After an hour and a half with Mr Jones I must admit I was really struggling to see why his doctor had asked us to visit, I mean to say, Mr Jones was a lovely man to say the least. He had a cosy bungalow near to the surgery; he made us overly welcome and told us all about his fascinating life. It was definitely a preferable way to spend an afternoon than stuck in a dingy lecture theatre attempting to learn biochemistry, but from a medical perspective, I couldn’t see how listening to a man in his eighties life story would help to grasp the importance of primary care.

“I presume you have an interesting medical condition?”

“And how are you nowadays?”

“And are you keeping yourself in good health?”

We tried -very hard to draw out of him some of his medical history throughout the afternoon, assuming that it may be a sensitive subject and not to be too blunt, but all our prompting seemed to go to waste and Mr Jones merely overlooked our comments and continued.

He told us all about the war and his military training; he reminisced about the friends he had lost and terrifying situations he had been in, laughing where others may have cried. He talked about peace-keeping postings abroad and showed us photos. He went on to tell us about how he met his wife in a dance hall; watching a smile break across his face as he spoke of her. He talked then about the homes they bought together and the children they raised, who are now raising families of their own. Although I asked, he didn’t speak of his working life after the army, in fact apart from time spent with his wife he said very little about civilian life. Around ten minutes before we left he finally spoke of his health, about the facial cancerous growths that he keeps having removed, his diet controlled diabetes, although this seemed rather tame compared to the brain tumour victims and the MS suffers we’d been seeing on previous weeks.

I left rather disgruntled and still wondering the purpose of the last hour and a half. It was really only on the way home that it struck me why the doctor had asked us to visit. I feel a fool for not appreciating the extent to which the loss of his wife and hit Mr Jones as now it seems blindingly obvious, whereas at the time, each heartfelt statement about the loss of his wife was diluted by ten stories of the happy times they spent together.

“I’m Mr Jones, I’m 83 and 9 years ago I lost my wife”,

That’s how Mr Jones introduced himself, he never recovered from losing his wife and he even said himself,

“People say it will heal with time, but it won’t, no one will ever replace her”

It was obvious whilst speaking to him how desperately in love with his wife he was but it never seemed to hit home how hard her death had struck him. Speaking of his children he mentioned how he sees them not as often as he’d like and talking of his friends’ he spoke of how few of them are still around.

I feel the only difference between a normal day and the day we visited was that we were there to listen to him reminisce, which he does to escape the pain of a reality without his wife.

“If you want to know about bad times, I can tell you, I been unhappy now for 9 years”

The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne once said, “age imprints more wrinkles on the mind than it does on the face”. Having met Mr Jones and listened to his stories I know that it would be difficult to determine how much this man has been through by merely examining his appearance or physical symptoms as I first did. With this piece of art I have attempted to manipulate the metaphor ‘wrinkles are etchings of experience’ by turning each of the lines on his face into a literal event. I feel there are two ways to look at this painting, from a distance as an overview which I feel is how I first viewed Mr Jones, seeing nothing but a friendly old man with maybe slight signs of skin cancer and retinopathy or you can look a little closer and see that there’s much more to Mr Jones than diabetes and cancerous growths.