POTIPHAR'S BIOGRAPHY:

When Mark Allen, the acting editor of World Medicine, asked me to run a  fortnightly column, it needed a name. At that time there were columns with names like Predator and Scavenger, whose authors had resigned in the management shake-up there. So I thought it would be amusing to have a less macho name, echoing these, and came up with Ruminant, implying the idea of chewing over current events and spitting them out. I suggested we might have some kind of cow, or better still a camel, as the header.

In the event, the staff cartoonist came up with a wonderful cartoon dromedary seeming to embody intelligence, stubbornness and a supercilious disdain which actually moulded the character of the column as it developed.

Accordingly, Potiphar, as I came to call him, became a sort of alter-ego not only in the Ruminant columns, but in later journalistic and creative projects.