FOOD

FALKO BURKERT

Rock me, apple strudel! Falko Burkert, originally from Heilbronn in Germany, is the toast of Edinburgh, or at least those parts of the city which like their bread dense as a Wagner opera and cakes which rival Heidi Klum for all round tastiness.

Burkert is a konditormeister, a word with no equivalent in English, but which means that he is a master craftsman, a virtuoso with any food involving sugar - sweets, biscuits, chocolate, ice cream, cakes. He is 35, and attained the esteemed rank of konditormeister three years ago, having been in training since 1987.

"This is a very old and proud profession, " he says. "Most people think, 'Oh, he's just a baker.' But I am not. The tradition is very important to me. In the old days, they were artists. It was a way to be creative with food, to create a piece of art which lasts until the moment it is eaten. Then you see the smile on people's faces and know you have made them happy - that is the aim of our profession."

After working around Edinburgh as a pastry chef, in 2005 Burkert took a stall at the weekly farmer's market on Castle Terrace. Although he specialises in cakes, it is his bread - made with rye flour imported from Germany - which has made him a rising star among local foodies.

In order to ensure his food is fresh for the Saturday morning market, Burkert starts baking on Friday at 10am and does not stop till until around 4am on Saturday. He mans the stall until 2pm, and after cleaning and tidying will have been awake for over 30 hours.

Hehas big plans for 2006, hoping that by March he will have opened a shop. That will allow him to take on an apprentice, which is very important as he wants to pass on to a new generation the skills of the past; it is his great dream to found a school. Once the shop is up and running, he hopes to open an old-fashioned continental-style coffee house.

Burkert is a nostalgist. He doesn't seem to fit the 21st century. He hates computers and refuses to own one. When he writes, he uses a fountain pen. The machine which he uses to make Baumkuchen, the cake which he considers to be his masterpiece, is 70 years old.

Baumkuchen is his version of Proust's madeleines; he first tasted it at the age of four when his aunt in Dresden sent one for Christmas, and his love of the cake seems tohave inspired his future career. Now, when he thinks of it, he slips into a kind of reverie, imagining a future food culture rooted in the values of the past.

"Most cakes you eat these days taste overpoweringly of chemicals, " he says, "so I think it's important to go back to the natural ingredients like real vanilla. When I use cinnamon in a recipe, I actually get the sticks and grind them. Our tongues have to get used to these real flavours again, but I believe people have had enough of what is on the market and are hungry for something new. The new will be going back to the way things used to be."

www. foodwithlust. com

Peter Ross

SCIENCE

ONE-EIGHTY

"Science is a very serious subject, " says Andrew Morris. "We want to give it a kick up the arse."

Morris, 26, is one of a group of friends, all scientists, based in Edinburgh. They are currently busy working on a new strand of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, to be known as OneEighty.

"The name represents what we are doing - a complete turnaround on the usual way of doing a science festival, " Morris explains. "We are taking aspects of modern culture which people are interested in - music, comedy, art - and having science relate to that, rather than starting with the science. The mix is going to be approximately 80-per cent entertainment, 20-per cent science, but we need that to engage with people who wouldn't normally think about science."

OneEighty will take place over three days in April, and details of the programme are yet to be announced, but to give you a flavour, plans are in place for an event at The Bongo Club called Maad Skillz, which - in part - will explore the physics of breakdancing; tiny computers will be sewn into clothing of breakdancers in order to measure acceleration, spin and momentum. "Breakdancing has never been analysed in that way before, " says Morris. "Today we have a rehearsal with these kids who are 16 and have never even been in a room with a physicist before."

What is the point of all this? Partly it is that Morris and his colleagues perceive a significant gap in the audience for the Edinburgh International Science Festival - they feel that there has been little to attract those in their teens, 20s and early 30s, and that this feeds a worrying trend. "At the moment the uptake of science subjects at school is going downhill; schools are shutting physics labs and not offering maths. It's crazy. So we are trying to make science less abstract and more relevant to young people."

To this end, there are also plans for an event, The Big Wave, on the science of surfing. The Big O, which was to look at the physiology of the orgasm, has been postponed until 2007 on the grounds that it would have been tricky to stage and there would have been legal difficulties. Male and female performers were to have sex while hooked up to equipment which measures heart rate, blood pressure, muscle contractions and skin conductivity. "There is a lot of very serious research involved in this, " says Morris. "It wasn't just going to be a full-on Amsterdam-style sex show."

Morris has a zoology degree from Edinburgh University and once dressed as a giant midge for a Sky News item on the launch of a midge trap, which he had helped to develop. His own interest in science was fuelled by Johnny Ball, David Attenborough, and childhood trips to Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum. He wants OneEighty to help a new generation get the bug.

"As science becomes more complicated, the gulf between scientists and society grows, " he explains. "There is a lot of sensationalism about science in the media, and I think people ought to be able to better understand what's really going on." But having said that, "A lot of our events revolve around having fun and getting drunk."

The Edinburgh International Science Festival runs April 5-16, www. science festival. co. uk; the OneEighty strand runs April 13-15, www. scifri. org. uk

Peter Ross

ACTING

ASHLEY JENSEN

Ashley Jensen breaks off from the interview with something between a shriek and a laugh; another actor has just come into the room and given her some surprising news. "I'm a crossword clue in The Mirror! Oh my God, there's a wee claim to fame! I've arrived!"

This is an understatement. Jensen, 36, is talking on the day after her 'shock' victory atthe British Comedy Awards at which she won Best Actress and Best Newcomer; in fact it could have been a shock only to anyone who hadn't seen her exquisite performance as Maggie in Ricky Gervais's Extras, in which she played the Laurel to his Hardy - the bumbling best friend, good-hearted but wrong-headed. While Gervais and his writing partner Stephen Merchant specialise in the comedy of embarrassment, they are keen on having a warm human relationship at the centre of the piece - in The Office it was between Tim and Dawn, in Extras it is between Maggie and Andy.

"I don't think of myself as a comedy actress at all, " says Jensen. "So this has all been a bit of a rollercoaster for me. I was a huge fan of The Office, I have the DVD box set, I am in awe of Ricky and Steve, so I feel like I got the job of the year with Extras. Then to be nominated for the awards and actually win them both has just been out of this world really."

Jensen begins filming the second series of Extras in May, which means it will probably be on BBC2 in the autumn. Later this month she can be seen in The Eleventh Hour, a series of four 90-minute dramas in which she co-stars with Patrick Stewart, who also appeared in the final episode of Extras.

She plays Rachel Young, the Special Branch bodyguard to Professor Alan Hood, a government troubleshooter who deals with crises stemming from contemporary science. Journalists have been calling it ITV's answer to Doctor Who, but writer Stephen Gallagher likens it to Quatermass and Emma Peel from The Avengers taking on science's bad guys - maverick human cloners and so on. Jensen prepared for the part by spending time with actual armed protection officers. "It was absolutely fantastic to go from playing Maggie in Extras to the character in The Eleventh Hour, " she says. "I hope people take me seriously in it."

Originally from Annan in Dumfries and Galloway, and now living in London, Jensen is a graduate of Edinburgh's Queen Margaret College and a veteran of many theatre productions both in Scotland and England. She admires Julie Walters and Judi Dench for their versatility, the nonchalance and ease with which they flit between comedy and drama; it's a model she has always been keen to follow.

"As a child I always knew acting was what I wanted to do, " she says. "I didn't go into this business to be a famous person. I'm an actress. I love doing theatre, classic plays and new writing. To me, that is what being an actress is about, rather than being a red carpet person in a pounds-300 pair of shoes. Last night I had on a pair of pounds-5 shoes I have owned for ten years."

Walking down the red carpet on her way into the ceremony, Jensen was ignored by the assembled media, which suited her just fine; afterwards, she went out a side door insearch of chips. Today, however, everything is different. "It's a whole new world, and very exciting, but if it all dried up tomorrow at least I've still got my two wee awards."

Far from drying up, it seems likely that 2006 will be a huge success for Jensen. In addition to The Eleventh Hour and Extras, she has a part in Michael Winterbottom's film A Cock And Bull Story, and no doubt the offers will now be rolling in. America, too, looks promising as she has signed with Samuel L Jackson's agent. Nine down, five across: watch this space.

The Eleventh Hour is on ITV1, January 19

Peter Ross

SPORT

KEVIN THOMSON

Kevin Thomson was only seven years old when his dad took him on the bus. The journey wound its way from the family home in Peebles to Glasgow, where father and son watched their beloved Hibs secure a rare trophy win in the 1991 Skol Cup final. Allan Thomson then took his wee boy to Edinburgh to watch the celebrations as Hibs paraded the trophy along Princes Street. They absorbed those priceless images together.

There was something warm, even oldfashioned, about that shared experience and the sense of a boy's own adventure continued as father and son travelled together again. It became clear that young Kevin had outstanding potential as a footballer, certainly too much promise to be kept hidden away in the relative obscurity of football in the borders. More talent scouts came to watch promising schoolboys in the Edinburgh leagues, so father and son hit the road again and commuted three times a week so that Kevin could play for the famous Edinburgh feeder club, Hutchison Vale. The family's dedication was rewarded in 2001 - a decade after he watched them as a seven-year-old at Hampden - when he signed his first professional contract at Hibs.

He made his first team debut at the end of 2003, so why might it be 2006 that establishes Kevin Thomson as the next real star of Scottish football? The answer owes everything to the serious injury to his right knee which robbed him of a year of his career, from May 2004 to the following April. Because of the time lost to injury, Thomson's time spent in the Hibs first team spans only 13 months. It is the talent, temperament and consistency he has shown in that period which has persuaded experienced observers to regard him as potentially the best of Hibs' current batch of dashing young blades.

They can be a boisterous, cocksure bunch; all hair gel, blond streaks and attitude. So many comparisons have been made to boy bands that the analogy has become tiresome. But Thomson - who only turned 21 in October - is quieter than the others, more reflective as a consequence of his lost year, and the most thoughtful and impressive of them all when dealing with the media. When he said he admired David Beckham for "having his own hairdresser" it was a joke (with some of his teammates you wouldn't be so sure).

Teammates Garry O'Connor, Derek Riordan and Scott Brown - Thomson's best friend and flat-mate in an apartment overlooking Hibs's Easter Road stadium - have beaten him into the full Scotland international team, but then, all are more experienced having not endured the same sort of setback through injury. Now, barring further misfortune or an unlikely loss of form, Thomson's composed and classy play will grace the left side of the Scotland midfield at some point in 2006. "It would be nice to think I'll be next in line. It's every boy's dream to play for the full international team, " he says.

One day he will embark on another big journey, the hardest of all, because it will surely break his relationship with Hibs. He is under contract until 2008 but Celtic, Rangers, Tottenham and the Belgian club Anderlecht are among those monitoring his progress, and an eventual move to a bigger club seems inevitable. Their young supporter is outgrowing Hibs.

Michael Grant

BUSINESS

MARIE MACKLIN

From her trademark gold business cards to her achievement in creating new communities in industrial wastelands and no-go zones, it is clear that Marie Macklin is a property developer with a difference.

Her company, Klin Group, first blazed a regeneration trail in unpopular locations in the east end of Glasgow, Barrhead and Paisley, building quality affordable housing at a time when national house builders would not take a risk on these areas. Her foresight paid off; less than a decade later house prices have spiralled and the nationals have moved in.

This year will see a slew of regeneration projects come to fruition in Macklin's home town of Kilmarnock, including the redevelopment of the Opera House into a new upmarket retail centre.

The town has woken up to opportunities to reinvent itself, and thanks to Macklin, blue plaques will soon go up around Kilmarnock, celebrating its historic past.

And people who bought Klin's first homes in Kilmarnock are in the money as flat prices have risen from pounds-40,000 to pounds-120,000 in seven years. Macklin says high property prices in Glasgow are attracting a new influx of buyers, with Glaswegians making the bulk of new house purchases.

Macklin, whose business hero is US billionaire Donald Trump, was inspired by Trump's regeneration of the rundown streets of Harlem. She wrote to him for advice and says his most important tip was "bring the community with you".

"Developers are seen as 'get rich quick'. That's not our way. We're not just developers. We're concerned with the regeneration of the entire community and are in it for the long term, " Macklin says.

While the urban regeneration of former industrial titans Glasgow and Dundee has grabbed the limelight, Macklin has quietly succeeded in kick-starting a regeneration drive in Kilmarnock, which also suffered the loss of its heavy industries and which missed out in the Eighties housing boom. Like other secondary towns, it had haemorrhaged jobs, shops and people. Macklin's vision was not just to arrest decline, but create a new vision.

Her persuasive skills also brought Scotland's first Morrisons supermarket to Kilmarnock. Macklin had invested in the regeneration of Barclay House, former site of the town's locomotive manufacturing base, creating upmarket flats and establishing a new Heritage District. She was determined to attract outside investment and persuaded Sir Ken to shake hands on a deal.

Macklin, an experienced financier who formerly worked with the Royal Bank, had a down-to-earth introduction to the building industry, trotting round sites at three years old in the footsteps of her father who founded the family firm.

A big fan of Kilmarnock FC, she almost became Scotland's first female football club owner when she launched a pounds-2.1 million bid for the club. The bid failed, but she remains a major shareholder.

She has just completed a new luxury home for herself, her husband and her two bulldogs Billie Buster and Maggie Mae and has tapped into a growing demand for oneoff luxury homes. "Scotland is changing. We've had numerous enquiries for pounds-1 million properties for people in business and entertainment, " Macklin says.

As a result this year The Klin Group will launch a service creating pounds-1 million plus bespoke properties, yet another new departure in what promises to be a bumper year for Macklin.

Valerie Darroch

MUSIC

DRIVE BY ARGUMENT

Unless you're under 20, or pay more attention than is healthy to the minutiae of the music industry's ever-changing woes, you probably haven't heard of MySpace. A community website with over 40 million members, it gets more hits than Google, and its networking powers have been harnessed by bands the world over.

Last year's overnight success story, four Yorkshire teenagers called the Arctic Monkeys, built a massive fan base thanks to giving away their music on sites such as Myspace. Drive By Argument - five kids thrown together by lecturers while studying music at Paisley University - have spent the past six months doing the same, and it's already paying off.

Singer Stewart Brock, guitarists Colin Keenan and Stuart Kennedy, along with bassist Ryan Drever and drummer Lewis Gilbert, met in October of 2004, charged with writing a few songs for a course module. By last summer, they were attracting the attention of major labels, playing at T in the Park and spending more time gigging than studying.

Their sound is a frantic amalgamation of tightly-coiled guitar riffs and muscular rhythms: a less studied version of The Killers, a more joyous Joy Division. "We listen to so much different stuff, " says Brock, the band's flat-vowelled English singer, and de facto frontman. That their diverse influences - from Kanye West and Mogwai to Kylie and McFly - were harnessed so quickly, the band put down to the fact that, in the beginning, they hardly knew each other, "so if something was shit, one of us would just say, " explains Keenan.

They've only released one limited-edition single so far, Sex Lines Are Expensive Comedy, on Sony offshoot One Records (it sold out within days), but can easily sell out 400-capacity gig venues, where the front rows sing along.

"We're getting more used to headlining gigs, " says Ryan Drever. "You feel more comfortable when you know that people will actually show up to see you." Indeed, the next year will be a headlong dive into the mouth of the music business: headline gigs, negotiating an album deal, conquering America, and so on.

Help on the last of these has come in the form of ice hockey team the New York Rangers, who adopted the band's first single as their signature tune. "So every time they come out on to the ice at Madison Square Gardens, " explains Drever, "our song is playing."

"Our music publisher has a rep in the States, and he was just playing it to anyone who would listen, " says Brock, "and somehow the team heard it." In addition, the team are set to use the single as part of a nationwide television campaign, the kind of exposure which most bands, young or not (and Drive By Argument are young: "I want to hold off going to America until I'm 21, so I can drink, " jokes Keenan) can only dream of.

So will they take over the world? "If nothing else, we might take over the hockey world, " says Lewis Gilbert. "Well, " replies Drever, "I like hockey. I'd be happy with that."

Leon McDermott

FILM

VICTORIA BEATTIE

"People are like chemicals, " says Victoria Beattie. "You put them together and some kind of reaction occurs. That's what you're looking for when you're casting, the way two chemicals react when pushed up against each other."

Beattie has been working as a casting director on many of the most adventurous films made in Scotland, but it is only in the last year she has turned to directing films herself. Quicken, a short, beautifully crafted and mesmerising work, stands out among recent short films. An old man sits, silent and catatonic in a chair, children play around him, dress him in blankets, while outside their mother stands brooding, troubled and smoking. The fascination of it is in the detail, the minutiae of performance. By her own admission it is "unforgiving".

Beattie is currently writing her next short film, using the same method as she did for Quicken. Instead of constructing a conventional script, she begins by writing a short story. That is what she works from, allowing the film to emerge as a collaboration with director of photography, crew and actors, including in Quicken's case Marcel Zyskind (DOP) and Stuart Wilson (sound) who have worked together on films by Bertolucci, Lars Von Trier, and Michael Winterbottom.

Filmed on the Straad Peninsula on Bute, Quicken was heavily affected by its location. "Not so long ago, a woman walked from the other side of the island and straight into the sea. Hazel Robertson, a local who helped us on the shoot, found the woman's body. The build of the script was very much affected by this place and the stories it already appeared to hold."

What stands out are the intimate performances: particularly those of the two children. "They came from the island and island children are different from mainland children. I think it's to do with having the sea around them. We were a very small crew, but they had an almost stubborn charisma that would refuse any persuasion of 'acting'. The only way to work with them was by powering up their natural energy. It sometimes felt like winding up spinning tops and letting them go."

Her directing career began in theatre, working on devised projects. From the start she was interested in understanding the actor and drawing out a performance, and went on to theatre commissions for Tramway, the ICA in London, the Green Room in Manchester and CCA for whom she did Crush, which included a video piece by David Mackenzie. She has directed in many different countries and even done a show in Dutch. "I like working in different languages. I've done castings in the Lebanon where it was all done in French or Arabic. I loved the feeling of not knowing exactly what was being said. I could watch the performance and sink into it like music."

A stint in television followed, and she began work as a casting director, casting David Mackenzie's first feature, The Last Great Wilderness. Often she is involved in a project from early on, helping to put those essential chemicals, the actors, in place before the script is even complete. Currently, she is working on a new feature film by Chris Cooke, Where We Come From, and a casting for The Water Horse. Her own work promises to be radical and risk-taking. "I love Bergman, Kieslowsky, Tarkovsky. I am most interested in what comes of the camera dwelling with a character, charting the small things, noting the fragments that form into gunpowder."

Quicken has been selected to show at The Curzon, Soho on January 7 and by Scottish Screen to be one of their 'Best Of 2005' short films

Vicky Allan

WRITING

DOUG JOHNSTONE

Midway through the seven months it took Doug Johnstone to write Tombstoning, his partner gave birth to their first child. He was juggling rehearsing his band, writing journalism to make a living, child care and sleepless nights, and yet still managing to write a novel as well.

"Looking back at my diary I can't really believe that I did that, " he says. "I would just grab an hour here and there. Maybe there is a bit of that comes over in the book, the sleep deprivation, the psychosis of writing at 7am when you've hardly slept."

Set in Arbroath, Tombstoning, due to be published by Penguin in July this year, is a literary thriller about a thirty-something man who returns to the town of his childhood for a high school reunion. Two bodies are then found in the sea at the bottom of the cliffs. The book takes its title from the activity of tombstoning - throwing yourself off a high cliff into the sea - a form of extreme sport mainly practised on the south coast of England. Arbroath, lately, has seen a few tombstoners. Johnstone is not one of them. "If you've ever been on Arbroath cliffs, it's a treacherous place. And the sea - I wouldn't even go paddling in there never mind jump off a cliff." The cliffs, a five mile stretch of sandstone are, he says, quite striking, "a blood-red colour".

From Arbroath himself, 35-year-old Johnstone left 17 years ago to go to university in Edinburgh, where he studied nuclear physics, and has been back little since. He went on to do a PhD in "the photoproduction of prions" and later got a job designing missile guidance systems for Marconi. He didn't enjoy it and started going to gigs and writing music reviews in his spare time. Johnstone has never been to a high school reunion himself.

"I'm fascinated by the whole Friends Reunited thing, " he says. "It kind of mindboggled me a little bit. I mean people were really getting in to it and divorce rates were soaring as people went back to their old childhood sweethearts."

Tombstoning is his second attempt at a novel. The first followed a band who fall out while on a tour of the Highlands. Music is his other big passion. One part of the lo-fi indie outfit, Northern Alliance, he plays the drums, guitar and sings, rehearsing whenever he can fit it in. In recent years, he says his taste in writing has changed.

Once a big Raymond Carver fan, he now likes to read bigger works with a strong narrative arc and "stuff really happening". Tombstoning is not just a straightforward "stuff happening" thriller though: it is far more searching than that as it examines past and present. "One of the characters is of the opinion that the past makes you who you are and the other is the one who goes back, believing you can reinvent yourself every day and wake up and be a different person. Really it's something in between."

Tombstoning is published by Penguin in July

Vicky Allan

ART

HENRY COOMBES

Henry Coombes' film commission for Tramway, due to be screened this July, promises to be a strange and possibly troubling piece. The golden retriever of Laddy And The Lady is not just a golden retriever, but an actor dressed up as a golden retriever. It sounds funny and pantomimic, but, says Coombes it's not.

"It's quite a serious film, " he says, "shot at the Tramway against a grey backdrop. Props are very minimal. There's a sort of moral ambiguity to it. It's just a script that I came up with, a story and a relationship between a woman and her dog. It's not sensationalistic, it's about a relationship, the love between the animal and the owner. It's the excitement of the pheasant shoot; the dog can hardly suppress its excitement, but the lady has to keep the dog under control and yet allow it to retrieve the bird. But it's about the need for Laddy the dog to please, his love for achievement. But when he gets success and gets the final bird, nothing has changed for the Lady, but a lot has changed for the dog. She doesn't do anything outside the discipline of dog handling, yet when you watch it obviously you come back to realising the dog is an actor in costume. " Commissioned by the Scottish Arts

Council, with pounds-15,000 funding, Laddy And The Lady is a major project which Coombes spent nine months working on, creating all the props himself.

Not all Coombes' work is on film - this is in fact his first properly funded short film - instead he works across a range of media from written short stories to watercolours, and he has already had exhibitions at Switchspace and Transmission and is represented by Sorcha Dallas.

From Kent originally, now 28 years old, Coombes did his foundation course at St Martin's College of Art followed by a BA at Glasgow School of Art. His works seem to inhabit an old-fashioned world of plus fours, class-values and landed aristocracies. According to art and cultural critic Neil Mulholland, Coombes "emphasises the entrenched political, cultural and class connotations of the traditional media that he works in. Stiff pragmatic oil painting is harnessed to the exhausted mores of the tweeded aristocracy. The fluid eroticism of Baroque painting is applied to the svelte creases of an urban folk devil's dog-eared leather jacket." His next project, he hopes, will be a film about the animal painter, Edwin Landseer, "his final madness and breakdown".

Vicky Allan

FASHION

BRIGID MCGAW

Brigid McGaw laughs when she is asked when she first thought she might like to go into modelling. Like most models, she didn't feel she was the most attractive child. There was bad skin and braces, only removed a couple of years ago, in her transition from duckling to swan.

"To be honest, I couldn't tell you when I first had the idea. It was just a thought I kept having and then I decided to give it a try." Three years into a medical course at Edinburgh University and set on being a doctor, at 21, she decided to bite the bullet, did a test shoot with a photographer and went down to London to make the rounds of the agencies. Almost immediately she got picked up by Premier (Naomi Campbell's agency) and already she is promising to be a strong new face on the modelling circuit, with catwalk work and shoots for magazines, including a Norfolk beach fashion story for Glamour, behind her.

"The people in fashion are a lot nicer than they're perceived, " says McGaw. "A lot of people think they're quite bitchy and negative, cutting you down. But actually most people are really positive - passionate and enjoying their jobs. I saw a couple of those America's Top Model programmes and I think they sort of ham it up a bit."

Getting into the business has been, she explains, really just a matter of making it up as you go along. Catwalk work is all about being able to do the walk, and that, she says is all "kind of confidence really."

"I think a lot of the younger models, the ones starting out at 14, find it difficult. But I've come to it relatively late, and because I'm older I suppose I have more confidence. If you watch a couple of shows you see how they walk and just try and copy that."

Her approach to the everyday process of rejection is relaxed: she doesn't take it personally. "You realise when you go to casting that if they don't want you it's generally not because you're not good enough, but that they're looking for a different kind of person. I haven't had any bad experiences, yet I think if that's your main job and you get rejections and so on it's probably quite tough, but I know I can fall back on my degree. I think it's kind of a shame when you see some girls for whom a rejection means they don't have any money and they can't live."

McGaw grew up in rural Aberdeenshire. Her mother is a primary school teacher and father works at the university. "Obviously, " she says, "they're behind me in everything that I want to do. I think they probably were a bit worried that I might not study hard enough, but those fears have gone because they realise I've been doing both and it's fine."

At the moment she is dividing her time between two lives: term time is for study, holidays for modelling. "I'm really new to the whole thing, because I've only been doing it for a short while, so obviously I don't have a clue where it's going to lead, but my main aim obviously is to complete my degree and go into something in medicine."

Vicky Allan