Well, everyone else has an opinion on the death of Michael Jackson, and because I would sit here all night commenting on what everyone else has said, I thought I would add my thoughts, here, in my own space.

Michael Jackson's music was pretty much the soundtrack to my mis-spent youth. I remember visiting a nightclub (the one where they used to exterior for the shots of outside Fawlty Towers) for the First Big Showing of the Thriller video. I was a bit disappointed but hype gets me like that.

I remember the nightclubs where I was a regular Thursday, Friday and Saturday night customer, playing his songs, dancing away to them. My friend Charlotte knew all the words to all the songs, and all the dances too.

Yes, he turned right freaky eventually. But which one of us doesn't have hang ups about some portion of their anatomy that they may well change if they had all his money?

Yes, he took the plastic surgery way too far. But how many people have that syndrome, where they are addicted to surgery and because they aren't in the public eye, no one says anything.

Does anyone else remember the picture of him in the oxygen tank - where the media claimed he was in there to live a longer life? Or the time Elizabeth Taylor visited him at Neverland and he gave her an elephant as a gift? Eccentric ... or bonkers?

The paedophile thing was never proven. Were the folk hitting on him because he was rich and famous? Did he pay the first lot off because he couldn't take the pressure and just wanted it to stop? Or was he really a pervert? We will never know the truth and we can speculate till we are blue in the face.

I thought he was a sad, lonely man who didn't really understand the world he lived in, perhaps didn't even want to understand it. An eccentric, definately.

He was hugely talented in his heyday, perhaps the court frights he had made him less able in the later years, his ill health and lack of understanding, but when I was younger, he was The Man! There are very few acts I can name nowadays that can put on a show like he used to! Britney flippin Spears can't even sing live!

I think it is a loss to the music world. He might have managed his comeback concerts, began selling albums again - we will never know.

But to die at 50 - that is only 5 and a bit years older than me - that is a waste of anyone's life.

Oh, and a footnote - I am reading a book right now that says "...for ours is an age without passion... [Kierkegaard]. How many show-folk are there now that can stir such passion? Where are The Beatles of our age? The Elvis Presleys? And - yes - the Michael Jacksons? Will this be remembered as a passionless century?