Mikkelus seems a quiet, middle-aged man, easily overlooked in a crowd. Exposure has left his short-cropped hair bleached by the sun and given him a deep permanent tan. Time, too, has begun to etch lines in his features, making it hard to guess his age.
When he smiles or laughs, which is often when he's talking to people in his office or around town, the laugh lines around his eyes and mouth seem to melt away the years.
His passport, issued in Switzerland, lists his age as fifty two, though in unguarded moments he seems either much older or much younger. The oldest medical degree hanging on his wall, conferred by Universität Ulm in 1982, is flanked by additional degrees in numerous languages denoting specializations, licensure in additional countries, or perhaps his inability to have yet found a university anywhere on the European continent that prints diplomas in English..
By all appearances, Mikkelus favors functional over fashionable in his personal life: his grey tweed or pinstripe jacket over a stylish Armani suit, his Sturmey-Archer 5-speed over an ATAG or Peugeot road bike, his Mini Classic Seven over a Jaguar or Rover, and his flat above the clinic over a large house or small estate. Either he is frugal to a fault, nobody has been able to impress upon him that doctors deserve to flaunt the best of everything, he doesn't charge enough to afford better, or he's spending much of his income on something that isn't obvious.
One could well argue that Mikkelus prefers functional over fashionable at work as well. The unpretentious outward appearance of his clinic in Guildford, consisting of little more than a waiting/reception area, two treatment rooms, and a small office, draws little attention to itself. Though nothing about the outside of the building or the waiting room suggests the clinic offers more than the ubiquitous aspirin, a glance at the biomedical equipment in the treatment rooms quickly dispels the notion that this is just another quaint rural clinic. Likewise, one look in the cabin of the air ambulance, based at the verti-port in the industrial part of town where noise from take-offs and landings are not apt to bother anyone, reveals that the "functional" level of emergency medical equipment Mikkelus and his flight crew provide may well mean the difference between convalescence and condolences to next of kin.
