Are you a rigid PC or a flexible, creative Mac?

I’m a great believer in binary divides. Sheeps and goats. Left and right. White and Blue Collar. Punks and hippies. Dog-owners and cat-lovers. Almost everyone, with a little thought, can be classified as one or the other. Even those who have 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.

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 flatmate. For while I am, in every respect, a PC - fussy, precise, never happier than when bringing administrative order to any aspect of our lives - he is a full-on Mac. He 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 flatmate is in meetings he 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.

He 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 flatmate is all Mac is the manner in which I am prone to all manner of viruses, like most hypochondriac males, while he 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 Peter Costello is the pie-charting, spreadsheeting, organogram-designing, megabyte-memory PC of all PCs. Whereas both Tony Blair and Bob Hawke are Macs. Both of them, unlike Peter Costello, 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 Peter Costello, 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. Kostya Tszyu is a PC, Anthony Mundine 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...

A non-shopping day: I would celebrate that

My cynicism about Valentine's Day is ancient and gnarled. It's not that I'm against celebratory days, not at all. We need more. It's just that this has become another in the endless series of cynical marketing fiestas that stud the year. It compares with Easter (festival of chocolate), Father's Day and Mother's Day (both devoted to the greeting card industry, with walk-on parts for golfing sweater manufacturers, gin distillers and market gardeners in the flower racket), Christmas (everything that can be bought and sold) and the new, wholly unabashed shopping festivals known as The Sales.

Oh yes, we do our duty, which is to trudge yet again to the shops, in this case for vile raspberry-coloured champagne, heart-shaped confectionary and so forth. But since shopping is what the country spends most of its time doing anyway, there is nothing special, or out of the ordinary, about it.

Wouldn't it be better to have new festivals that have nothing to do with buying things? There could be one day a year devoted to making up ancient quarrels - in person. That would be exciting. It would be full of high emotion, attempts at reconciliation going hopelessly wrong and confused debates about who was at fault, as if the country were suddenly dripping with real-life short stories.

Or, in this age of hyperactivity and stress, what about a day in which we all tried to stay in bed from dawn to dusk, doing absolutely nothing beyond a little gentle musing?

And I've always loved the idea of the Saturnalia, when roles were reversed. What about a topsy-turvy day, when city tycoons march out to man the Coles checkouts, parents are forced to obey their children, and the boy from Liverpool with the most Asbos becomes Home Secretary for 24 hours? There we go: Sorry Day, Snoozefest and Somersault Day.

Q: Who will make me a perfect wife?
A: A woman divorced from everything I've been looking for in a girlfriend.

For the most of my life it has been a complete mystery to me how you choose a girlfriend. Over and over I would meet some disco minx at a party - noticeable because despite being in a room of screamingly drunk people she would be the loudest, most drunk person in the room - and for some reason, probably to do with being drunk and loud myself, I would find this devastatingly attractive.

Then, and mates in Brisbane will be familiar with this sitcom of stupidity, I would wake up the next morning, declare myself in love. A month later I'd be asking, "Are all women mad?" A month after that one would get the self-reflective,"What is it about me? Why do I always go for nutters?" And then, as the relationship hit three month of its doomed trajectory, we get the "That's it, I'm done with females" whine and have been in this state of grumpy singledom for ages now.

Now I think it is time to face reality. For goodness sake, even my new found frisbee coach is in love. Keeps renditioning his new found love and his intention to send flowers to the lucky girl for Valentine's Day. Its like saccharine coated disease everyone around me is smitten with. Despite the fact in every other area of life we assume that a day older will mean a day wiser, when it comes to women this does not seem to hold true. I assume that this year I am better at being a person than I was last year. I take it for granted that I will get better in my career. So, how come, despite 08-odd years of involvement with women, I seem to have learnt nothing about how to pick a girlfriend? Are we destined to all be slaves to our hearts and our loins for ever and ever? And if so, what a world of pain that is - to be ruled by the cock and the insane glimmer that is the attraction of a mad woman across a crowded bar.

No, it is the time to say, "Stop!" Just as I once had to accept that no matter how hard I tried I was never going to be able to master that most primitive musical instrument, the tabla, so now the time has come to admit that I am never going to have a clue on what it is that makes for a good girlfriend, and so I must give up on that as well. Instead, I've decided to up the ante, to take game to a whole new level - I have decided to look for a wife.

On the surface, this may look like an act of gross folly - like accepting that I'm never going to master the tabla, and yet decide to approach Ustad Zakir Hussain (the most famous classical tabla player in India today) to become my guru.

But I think it makes sense, If you can't find a girlfriend who isn't a nutter maybe it's the quest at fault, not the object of the quest - maybe it's unrealistic to expect women to be anything other than cocaine-addled sociopaths who live for shoes and parties, when you go out to meet them at parties and find the ones with really high heels doing coke in the loos particularly attractive. Clunk! The sound of penny dropping...

But how does one find a wife, exactly? Well, like everything else in modern life, if you want advice you head to the Internet. Despite being a clever idea originally thought up to held research scientists share data, one of the best thing about the web is the huge outlet it gives to human bitterness - and firmly within this category you will find the excellent website nomarriage.com (motto:"If it flies, floats or fucks, you are better off renting it"). Now, this may give the impression that the site is biased against the ultimate commitment, but in fact the author (one presumes a hugely bitter and massively overweight, divorced, Internet-porn addict) provides what I, a newcomer to wife searching, consider to be some useful tips.

His first one is,"Be selfish. Look for wifely qualities, not girlfriend qualities." And immediately, I'm thinking,"Yes, Yes, oh overweight lord of loneliness." How many times have I fallen in love with someone who was great at dancing but couldn't rustle up breakfast unless it involved a trip to Starbucks?

The next one is, "Never marry a woman who has the same career ambitions as you do." That's not an issue here, cause finding woman in IT and peace in Middle East are both non-existent. "Avoid anyone in therapy," he says, "she is getting 50 minutes a week of 'how to hate men' brainwashing. It's expensive and you'll be expected to pay." Check. "Fidelity is important; never go out with a woman who, even occasionally, goes clubbing 'with the girls." Noted.

Other qualities to look for are:"Not complaining, not being moody, not being mad, no drug addicts, never marry a woman whose father is lawyer, never marry a woman you don't fancy - marriage is a long time so there will be rows and frostiness, and at least if you can fuck and forget it'll stop you straying."

To which I would add a couple more; if you have an obsessive interest (be it music, fishing or mountaineering) it's essential that you future wife doesn't share this, otherwise when are you ever going to get away from her? She should have nice breasts - we're all human and, as someone once said,"We all need a nice cleavage to nestle into come a winter's evening." And most important of all, make sure that she is solvent so that when you buy a house together you can afford a garden shed.

Apart from that, I leave you with a quote.
"Women are life elephants. Everyone likes to look at them but no one likes to keep one." Well, maybe it's time to invest in a pachyderm.