Professor Mega-Breakfast

Portraiture is not really my thing. At least, it hasn't been. But recently, I've been doing some more playing around with pictures of friends and family (do I ever do anything except play around?) and I like this one. This sturdy fellow is a Professor of Rural Medicine, composited with certain elements that seemed fitting. That's the Beauly Firth in the background, and more or less the view from his house a few miles outside Inverness.

I won't embarrass him by telling you what a remarkable chap he is. A medical man by vocation, I've known him since our college days, and he has continued to distinguish himself ever since, in that impressively modest way that medical folk have. Like teachers, they know what they do matters, so don't need to make a song and dance about it.

One curious fact, though: Phil has run the West Highland Way ultramarathon (that is, the 95 miles from Milngavie, just north of Glasgow, to Fort William, up hill, down dale, through bog...) not once but twice, both times in his fifties, and yet, and perhaps more impressively, I have seen him eat the twelve-part mega-breakfast at Cobbs Cafe in Highland Industrial Supplies (for the record, I had a bacon roll). Apparently, this is a regular treat. Let's see: that's bacon, sausage, black pudding, baked beans, fried eggs, scrambled eggs, mushrooms, fried tomato, fried bread, and three other "foods to avoid" I can't recall... Awesome. It seems doctors take a very different view on what constitutes a healthy diet from food faddists...