Miss Scotland is crying. Great pools of tears are welling up in her eyes and cascading down her tiny, luscious face. With a sigh and a great, sweeping sniff she wipes them away, the delicate mauve of her eye-shadow smudging and running down her deliciously frosted brown cheeks. If it is possible, it makes her look even more gorgeous.

''I'm so sorry,'' she sobs. The photographer and I sit mesmerised, inadequate with astonishment, our mouths hanging slightly open. Even as I reach out to touch her arm, as gently as if touching china, I am aware a mean little voice inside me asking why, oh why, do so some women manage to look utterly exquisite when they cry, while the rest of us look like babies whose faces got sat on when they were hot.

As for the photographer, I suspect he is crushing the urge to jump up and catch her in his arms like Mr Rochester, and soothe her tears, and murmur: ''There, there, my darling, I will make everything all right.'' If I were a man that's what I'd want to do. In fact, I would go so far as to guess that the divine Paula Murphy, in tears or not, spends her whole life attracting wide-eyed, slack-jawed stares from people she passes in the street.

What happens to the sick, the delirious and the seriously injured, when they are lying in their hospital beds and a girl in a white coat with a face like an angel introduces herself as Dr Murphy and squeezes their hand sympathetically, quite simply doesn't bear thinking about.

They're one and the same thing, you see. Paula Murphy is the reigning Sun Miss Scotland, the nation's leading beauty queen, wearer of bikinis and holder of a post-modern throne. She's also Paula Murphy MB Chb, medical graduate of Aberdeen University and senior house officer, late of surgical wards in the Victoria and the Southern General in Glasgow, who plans to go to Australia to work in Accident and Emergency.

Or not, as the case may be. Right now, though, she's just Paula the depressed policy holder, who has pranged her car on roads made greasy by rain after weeks of dry weather. Someone pulled out in front of her Ford Ka as she drove to meet us, and her insurance company have just told her on the mobile phone that she faces a (pounds) 400 excess. She's crying, less from shock, you suspect - for Paula is as resilient as they come - than from anger, because it's such a lot of money and money has never, ever grown on trees in the Murphy family.

She is, like so many beautiful girls, much tinier than you ever imagine her to be. Although she's wearing high shoes, she has the thin-hipped slightness of a schoolboy. Unlike so many beautiful girls, however, she is much more lovely in the flesh than in pictures. In real life, Paula is Audrey Hepburn meets Julia Roberts, altogether a disturbingly exotic creature to encounter on a wet Friday afternoon in a pub in Stirling.

When she starts talking, she is reassuring normal: bright, quick, insouciant, unassuming; not remotely ditsy. Paula spent most of her life in Alloa, then moved to Stirling. She went to St Modan's High School and then Aberdeen University.

Her father, a policeman, died when she was 13; her mother, Josephine, devoted her life to bringing up five children, of whom Paula is number two. Money was always tight and the children were encouraged to have part-time jobs. ''I think my mother thinks I've lost direction a bit,'' says Paula.

Ever since she was four, long before primary school, she wanted to be a doctor. It was ''the natural thing''. Studying, it seems, came easy. ''I must have been good in a former life,'' she grins. At school she worked at weekends, and then when she went to university she carried on working: bar work, modelling, anything. She is, you realise, someone who is always doing; always achieving, earning, working, smiling, phoning, painting, socialising, working-out.

When she was in third year at medical school, she was asked to model. Someone gave her a number to phone. ''My mum was never keen. I showed the number to her, and she said, get that nonsense out of your head, and rolled the paper up and threw it away. The next time it happened I didn't tell her. I think she has changed her attitude a bit now, especially if I can make lots of money.''

She stopped modelling to concentrate on her degree, then went back to it last August after she'd

finished her clinical pre-registration year in hospital. Just for the summer, you understand, just to try and pay off some of those dire student debts. Then the Sun Miss Scotland competition - worth a tantalising (pounds) 5000 - came up; and she won.

But how do they reconcile, the world of the glossy cattlemarket, of superficiality and lipstick and waxing bikini lines; and the world of medicine, of big things like life and death and suffering? How does someone with huge intelligence and years of training cross this chasm? Paula blythely shrugs off the paradox. For her, it's not an issue. If nothing else, she is a very modern kind of woman: restless, positive, driven, hungry to enjoy life now; not remotely hidebound by tradition.

Right now, she admits, she is having fun. Fun after years of hard slog which everyone outside medicine glamorises, but everyone inside recognises for what it is. ''Everyone I know in medicine, and all my really good friends are doctors, thinks the Miss Scotland thing is brilliant, and asks why I want to stay in medicine. Everyone that's not in medicine says, what a shame, why do you want to give it up?''

Maybe Paula just needs a good holiday - she admits it herself - but certainly, at 24, she is not as enthusiastic about being a doctor as she was 20 years ago.

''It's a hard slog, medicine. The first year was totally disillusioning. it's more than just a job; you have to devote your life to it. I don't like working weekends and nights and 12-hour days. The intention is to go back, but if I got a good offer, or won the lottery, I wouldn't. It's totally slave labour, you get pissed off at the way you are expected to accept everything. It's quite a cliche, really. If you're working on a surgical ward you feel like a glorified secretary, you spend the whole day clerking people in. A lot of the time you're expected to do a ridiculous amount of work. I don't know how you change the system but it needs to be changed.''

She knows better than anyone the triviality of what she's doing; she simply doesn't waste time getting angsty. ''When people say well done for winning, I feel I haven't done anything, I feel a bit of a fraud. But I have decided I'm just going to enjoy it. I have to make sure I make money from it. It definitely can be silly and trivial, but it's your own attitude that counts.''

Perhaps one of her most endearing features is that the traditional status, the grandeur, of being a doctor is not what motivates her. She is far too perceptive; too possessed of a sense of perspective. ''It's like any job. For the fashion stylist,

Miss World is the most important thing she's ever done. For me, it's a non-stressful, easy way to make money, so it's an attractive option.'' She volunteers she may not be able to do it for long before boredom sets in.

A talented artist - no, there really is no end to her talents - she was thrilled when the Sun, sponsors of the competition, carried a spread of her work, and someone phoned up wanting to exhibit them. ''I love art, I've always done it,'' she says. She is starting to smile now.

Inner beauty, it is said, always shows through. Perhaps Paula Murphy's real appeal is her warmth, her energy, her life force. Like many people who lose a parent early, she lives with pain and with a constant awareness that life is too short to waste. For her, carpe diem. Positive psychology fascinates her: she spends a lot of time reading books about it.

''I try to make the most of my life. You only live once, and life's what you make of it. What you think is what makes you attractive. As a nation, we are not positive, and we should teach children how to be from a young age.

''There should be more emphasis on mental attitude. I've read so much about it. A lot of people think it's nonsense, but it has worked for me so many times.''

She is similarly positive about Miss World. On November 8 she heads off for Nigeria in preparation for the competition on December 7. A true post-feminist, she sees nothing wrong in showing off her figure in a bikini.

''I don't know why there's all the fuss. I know it's very superficial, but I think Miss World allows the potential for good. It's one of the few things that brings all of the people of the world together.''

She is matter-of-fact about the controversy over holding the event in Nigeria, where a young mother, Amina Lawal, is under threat of death by stoning for adultery. She is not joining the threatened boycott. ''My gut feeling is that it won't aid the cause. If you move it, it just takes the media attention away from Nigeria. If we go there, it keeps the attention on the country.''

The appeal of Miss World is timeless. The competition, which Eric Morley devised in 1951, is set to attract a huge audience for Channel 5, particularly among ABC viewers and women. Paula says she's only watched it once.

''It was the one when Miss India won. They asked her who she looked up to in the world, and she said Mother Theresa and I just thought that's shit, it's just so cheesy.''

She smiles, that dazzling smile, and the heart of every man sitting in the bar with us misses a sudden beat. ''I've going to have to do some research, aren't I, to get some cheesy answers together.''

PAULA MURPHY

LIFE & TIMES

l Childhood: Paula was born on May 24, 1978, the second of five children, and educated at St Modan's High School, Stirling. The family home is in Broomridge, Stirling.

Medical career: She graduated MB Chb from Aberdeen University medical school in 2001 and worked as a junior hospital doctor in Glasgow until last August. Plans for a stint in Accident and Emergency in Australia have been postponed because of Miss World.

l Modelling career: A member

of the Model Team, she has appeared in The Herald, Daily Record, Scotsman, and Daily Mirror. She has done catwalk shows for Armani and Jaeger, and modelled for London hairdressers. She had a part in a pop video - ''some rubbish American band!''

l Art career: Never studied art formally, but paints continually. Did Higher art in her spare time. Her first exhibition is on November 3 at the Next Generation gym in Anniesland, Glasgow.

l Significant other: Mark Hogarth, presently modelling in Japan,

who works for Brian Wilson,

the energy minister, as a

researcher.