Hats off to Slovenian president Janez Drnovsek. After learning he had cancer, the 56-year-old head of state quit his official palace, sacked his staff and moved into a mountain cabin with his dog. Here he experienced a spiritual rebirth and began dressing in Indian clothes, playing the flute and (as the picture above reveals) fashioning headgear out of leaves. He now rejects conventional medicine and subsists on a vegan diet of organic fruit and vegetables. The economics PhD, who these days bakes his own bread, left his liberal party to form a movement promoting positive energy, animal rights, environmental responsibility and the impending apocalypse. “Politicians say what they think people want to hear. They don’t speak the language of a higher consciousness,” he says. “I have reached my inner peace and am not afraid any more.” His book The Thoughts on Life and Awareness reached number two on the Slovenian bestseller lists, behind the Da Vinci Code.

It is very easy to mock Mr Drnovsek’s new-age transformation, especially when you learn that he likes to “greet the trees” by dressing up in foliage. However, for all the anti-hippy propaganda preached at me by the punk and new wave records in my collection, I can’t help but admire the man. There’s something about illness and the threat of impending mortality that, God help me, brings out the Grateful Dead fan in us all.

Now, there is no chance whatsoever you’ll catch me skipping naked through the undergrowth, giving up hamburgers (despite by good friend Mr Beast’s entreaties) or communing with Mother Earth by drinking woad. Although politically sympathetic to the Green movement, CND and the campaign for fairer trade with the developing world, I always thought they all could make their cases more effectively by excommunicating those twats with face paint and stilts who clog up their demos. Being Scottish, I was schooled in a hairshirt brand of leftism that regards quilted toilet paper as an inexcusable frippery while Nicaraguans are starving. And though this macho, quasi-Calvinist tradition has its own feet of clay (as followers of this summer’s Tommy Sheridan defamation trial will attest) I was always more comfortable with its aesthetics than those from the more decadent end of the alternative lifestyle brigade.

Partly as a consequence of this - although more as a consequence of the fact my parents understandably wouldn’t have shelled out for me to go gallivanting about the globe at their expense - I never took a gap year. I always thought there was something vastly hypocritical about rich kids thinking they were saving the planet by jetting off on carbon-spewing long-haul flights to take advantage of the low prices afforded by third world poverty. While I’m sure this didn’t do my personal development any harm, however, it did leave me little time to admire the scenery. I’ve written before of my experience on the school-university-postgrad-work treadmill, which, for all it satisfied my ambition, often left me little time to enjoy life.

Being forced to take time out from the rodent run has, undoubtedly, done me good. OK, I haven’t managed to fulfil the list of personal targets I set myself for this year - I can’t even remember what they included, breaking the land speed record or curing AIDS or suchlike. But taking my days at a slower pace has given me a perspective on the world that I wouldn’t otherwise have had - the perspective that comes from ambling through the woods at three in the afternoon, or reading books I would never otherwise have had time to finish, or watching the light fade across the evening sky. I’m more confident in myself, all but impervious to the nonsense that accounts for the anxieties and fears of business-as-usual life. Don’t get me wrong, I want to return to normalcy and rejoin the human race again. But at the same time I’ve enjoyed the last year, and I’m grateful for the experience.

In his final interview before he died, the playwright Dennis Potter said his sensory faculties were heightened by the fact he knew he was about to succumb to cancer. He would look out his window and, Zen-like, see the cherry blossom tree in his garden amplified into the “blossomiest of blossoms”. I can’t claim the same for myself, no doubt because the worst-case scenario for me was always far more remote. But as he lives out his final days in the woods, I’m able to see Mr Drnovsek’s sense of unity with his surroundings as something I’d like to experience one day. Just not quite yet.