The lust for black and white

It's such a shame that the Times no longer forms part of the online conversation. It has, by a distance, the best columnists, and there's something worth discussing on it pretty much every day. Still, as Caitlin Moran likes to say, bitch gotta make rent.

Anyway, there was a line in the excellent Rachel Sylvester's article yesterday that made me think. This is the line, in the context of trying to classify David Cameron:

There is a curious mixture of tradition and modernity within this Converse-wearing Old Etonian who is as comfortable playing Fruit Ninja as tending his vegetable patch.

Is this really such a curious mix? I mean, I wear Converse trainers and went to Winchester. I play Angry Birds on my iPhone and muck about in my garden weeding, planting, pruning and so on. Is there any contradiction there? Must everyone who went to public school live exclusively in oxford brogues, black for town, brown for country?

There is a strange need to classify people into very specific pigeon holes, where one aspect of their nature serves to identify them across the board. People don't work that way. Tastes are personal and eclectic - would you really have guessed that Ed Miliband's favourite sport is American Football? Or that Francois Bayrou knows about the Konami code?