I’m a great believer in binary divides. Sheep and goats. Left and right. Mods and rockers. Punks and hippies. Hunters and sabs. Dog-owners and cat-lovers. Almost everyone, with a little thought, can be classified as one or the other. Even those who have never heard London Calling, who’ve never strayed anywhere near a hunt, or who can’t afford any pet at all, are, spiritually, one or t’other. And I am only too happy to tell you who is which, using my patent process of analytical personality classification.

What this tendency of mine to segregate, classify and list also points to is another key division of our times - perhaps the most significant dichotomy in our society. In the great debate over whether or not you’re a PC or a Mac I know that I’m a Pentium-driven, neatly filed, inbox-cleared, spreadsheet-obsessive PC.

Over the past few weeks it has been impossible to escape an advertising campaign which features the comic partnership of Mitchell and Webb in which one (David Mitchell) plays the nerdy, pie-chart obsessed, virus-prone PC and the other (Robert Webb) represents the funkier, more freewheeling and flexible Mac. The characterisations build on the distinctive personalities the two cultivated for their Channel 4 comedy Peep Show .

Now I know that drawing inspiration from contemporary advertising campaigns marks, in many ways, a surrender to the soulless commercialisation of our times. But as a PC myself I’m not particularly averse to - indeed, I’m rather at home with - soulless commercialisation.

Which, sadly, puts me at odds with my wife. For while I am, in every respect, a PC - fussy, precise, never happier than when bringing administrative order to any aspect of our lives - she is a full-on Mac. She is creative, spontaneous, colourful, much better attuned to design concerns, easier to communicate with, much happier free-associating and having fun, than tied to the office, and overall much more human.

Now, happily, the divide between PCs and Macs is not as wide as it used to be. We can both use Microsoft Office and it’s possible to send e-mails between one and the other entirely freely. But while the formal process of communication couldn’t be easier, we’re still speaking slightly different languages and living out very different existences.

When I’m in meetings, as a PC, I take copious notes and then formulate a to-do list of desired outcomes at the end. When my wife is in meetings she treats the printed agenda much as a medieval monk would have treated a piece of vellum parchment - making an illuminated manuscript out of it with elegant floral doodles while simultaneously forming acute, novelistic impressions of the character of each of the participants.

She will bring to the meeting an artistic sensibility and come away from it with the raw material for further acts of creativity, as well as anecdotes to spice up a lunch-time gossip. I will leave the meeting with a tightly focused agenda, a reminder to self to now rejig appointments for the third weekend in September and mild acid reflux.

And talking of system malfunctions, one of the ways in which I am a pure PC and my wife is all Mac is the manner in which I am prone to all manner of viruses, like most hypochondriac males, while she enjoys the robust health of a more highly evolved creation.

The division between PC and Mac is not, however, simply a matter of gender. Hillary Clinton, for example, is a PC while both her husband Bill and her principal rival, Barack Obama, are Macs. She exudes the chilly efficiency of a machine politician while they communicate a creative spontaneity in which the division between work and play has been relaxed (indeed, in Bill’s case, the division between work and play became so relaxed that hearing that the President was on the job became no sort of reassurance at all for his wife).

And, talking of politicians, the PC/Mac divide easily transcends party and ideological divisions. If I am a PC, and I surely am, then I can recognise that Gordon Brown is the pie-charting, spreadsheeting, organogram-designing, megabyte-memory PC of all PCs. Whereas both Tony Blair and David Cameron are Macs. Both of them, unlike Gordon Brown, look as though they treat managing the work-life balance as a practical daily requirement rather than the title for a new pamphlet, and both of them, unlike Gordon Brown, look as though they’re happier in conversation and out of a suit rather than on a podium and wearing a tie.

The PC/Mac dichotomy can, of course, be applied well beyond politics. Alex Ferguson is a PC, José Mourinho a Mac. Johnny Wilkinson is a PC, Kevin Pietersen a Mac. Peter Riddell is a PC, Ben Macintyre is a Mac. So far as I can see, there’s not a single person I know who can’t be slotted into one category or another. But then, of course, as a PC myself, I’m hard-wired to see it that way...

Cruel to be kind to Robbie

The news that Robbie Williams is celebrating his 33rd birthday by checking himself in to rehab has a certain poignancy. In the golden age of rock the quintessential hallmarks of excess were wrecked dressing rooms and televisions describing a parabola out of hotel windows. Now the absolute requirement for any confirmed hell-raiser is the same fate that society reserves for frail pensioners in their twilit days - a stint in a private nursing home.

Robbie’s referral to rehab comes as his former colleagues in Take That are enjoying a renaissance and his own career is, at best, stalling, so sympathy may be tinged with cynicism. But, for me, the most striking aspect to the story is the role of Elton John. Robbie’s mentor apparently “kidnapped” his younger friend and forced him to seek treatment. Inclined as I am to a temperamental libertarianism, sometimes the greatest service a friend can render is not offering a shoulder to cry on, but putting his mate in an armlock and marching him away from danger.

Praise for Polly

I know that it’s considered bad form by some of my colleagues to big up Polly Toynbee but in a BBC debate with the great Guardian columnist this week we were both as one in agreeing that Blair and Brown had mismanaged public service reform, that Labour’s abuse of patronage powers had strengthened the case for an elected second chamber and that the Government had acquiesced in a German-led EU stitch-up on the environment. I know I shan’t always agree with Polly, but even my limited, PC logic suggests that there is more to cheer, than sneer, about when she’s the one making arguments like that.

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