Some people are suggesting that I’m going all weird on them. Granted, most of the aforementioned think a bloke’s weird if he doesn’t tuck his shirt in, fails to play golf once a week, doesn’t own a home in Plettenberg Bay (or Plitt as they rather curiously call it), hasn’t a well balanced portfolio of both local and offshore shares plus a lump of Berkshire Hathaway stock, and whose bookshelf isn’t littered with self improvement and instructional books such as The Seven Habits of Highly Effective and Fucking Smug People or How to Bring Up Boys. It’s a fair cop guv’nor; based on these criteria of normality, then I’m uber weird.

Those within my ever decreasing circle whose opinions I value are also, however, questioning my recent behaviour, demeanour, and outlook.

I think it all started about a year ago so indulge me while I reminisce. We were in Pringle Bay, a little seaside dorp about an hour’s drive from Cape Town on the way to Hermanus. Most of the golf playing shirt tuckers wouldn’t give it the time of day, but I like it for reasons that will become apparent. Last September, the spring like weekend was drawing to a close and we were packing to return to cloistered Cape suburbia. I’d spent a glorious couple of days walking on beaches and up mountains, ribbing a few locals at the Hangklip Hotel, and generally testing the theory that a change is as good as a rest. I’d also mangled what appeared to me, clutching my stomach, to be several sheep. In reality I’d had a leg of lamb for Sunday lunch, but when two days later the animal was still battling to pass its way through the Williams digestive system, I made a snap decision.

No more meat. No chicken, duck, pheasant, quail, pork sausages, chops, bacon, sides of beaf, succulent T-Bones, pans of lightly floured sautéed liver, sweetbreads, pates, or oxtail marinated in red wine and whisky and then slowly stewed for several hours and served with fluffy, steaming dumplings. Overnight I became a full blown bona fide vegetarian and shunner of the roasts and boils that had previously served me so well for almost five decades.

And no more beer. No Castle, Black Label, Windhoek, Amstel draught, Guinness in a long can with that nifty widget thing that gives it that irresistible head, Kilkenny, Boddingtons in the yellow can with the bee motif, wheat beer from Germany, cherry beer from Belgium, Jack Black from Cape Town, or the glorious produce of the fantastic BrewDogs micro brewery in England.

Apart from a World Cup wild card kindly issued to me, I’ve stuck to the beer famine. As for the meat abstinence, not a sinew has passed my lips and I honestly believe that will remain the case until I die a lonely death of protein and iron deficiency.

But vegetarianism and avoidance of the frosty brew is merely an early manifestation of a much bigger, meaningful, and of course weirder philosophy.

I think I want out.

Let me qualify that; when I say out I don’t mean moving to a Madagascan beach, selling vanilla pods to eco-tourists and showing them around the nearby lemur sanctuary. I mean changing the way I do things, changing the way I live, and challenging the well entrenched ‘norms’ that we all take for granted. It’s not difficult to start, because I already have with the diet change. Ten kilos later I feel better than I have since my twenties, and that of course leads to clarity of thought that simply wasn’t there as I sucked down my twelfth pint and then soaked it up with a Lamb Rogan Josht from Bhandaris. Energy levels have risen, and that’s when I’m at my most creative, and as it usually turns out, my most irritating and destructive.

For example, when my son, dear goof that he is, came to visit last month and hit me with the double whammy of revealing he didn’t know which continent housed Germany and that his maths examine had yielded a harvest of 37%, I didn’t merely content myself with thrashing him within an inch of his life, I rang up the school. The details of my well constructed rant remain between me and the gibbering headmaster, but rant I did. How can a child at a top private school slip through the system so appallingly? It’s because of factory schooling, which just like factory farming, produces crap products.

Next day I enlisted the assistance of a private maths tutor, and evidence suggests that at least a doubling of the percentage will be the result. Beyond that short term success, I and a few other disgruntled fee paying saps are seriously investigating the formalisation of a home school institution, staffed by young, keen, bright educators who give individual attention to children who are INDIVIDUALS and who should be treated as such. Only conventional thought and the education authorities can stop the initiative, but I firmly believe the future of education will look very different to today’s crumbling model.

But back to Pringle Bay, the crucible of my weirdness.

The place is a sprawling conurbation of holiday homes, but I’m also detecting an ever increasing permanent population of commuters. Here we have a settlement, oozing charm, with a splendid sandy beach, surrounded by mountains and great natural beauty, dotted with bars and restaurants, some of which even serve edible food.

When I woke up last Sunday, the sun was burning orange behind the mountains, and I heard baboons barking. Having strolled onto the verandah and looked down at the Buffels River, there were three Cape otters ducking and weaving their way to the river’s mouth. The scene was so idyllic I nearly vomited.

Driving to the local shop for the newspapers and freshly baked bread, I passed a group of hearty locals clearing the fynbos of alien plants, and even at this early hour the car park of the village church was filling up. A nearly full moon was setting as I arrived back at the ranch.

All this is an hour from the throbbing metropolis. House prices range from a small cottage at the back of the town for R700,000, to a pretty fancy Cape Cod style beach house for R7m. If this were Johannesburg, Pringle Bay would be clogged with the jet-ski brigade, and plans for an 18 hole golf course in place of the wetlands would be well advanced. But it’s not, and so gives me the chance to convert from armchair alternate to full blown nutjob.

This vegetarian aspirant home-schooler is putting wireless internet into the bungalow next week, and in September is conducting a commuting trial for a fortnight. If it works, if I can bear the wet Tuesday nights at the Hangklip Hotel watching the locals with cigarettes stuck to their bottom lips play darts and fall off their stools, then perhaps the next phase towards bowing out of polite society will be launched.

Now who’s weird?