THE rain is audible, but can’t be seen, and its soft, lashing sounds intercept the contemporary jazz on the mini component set in the corner of John Junor’s office.

Every now and then, the brash sound of an engine, a horn, or a splash of water is heard from the traffic three stories below.

It’s a rainy afternoon in downtown Kingston, what better time for this lawyer-turned-People’s National Party (PNP) politician, turned-back-lawyer after 31 years to be reflective?

So John Junor eases back in his big green chair and says:

“It’s been a very interesting time, I tell you. I thoroughly enjoyed politics. It’s something that you can’t fake,” Junor says, immediately throwing in some advice.

“If you don’t like people, don’t go into it (politics). You have to love the man who’s going to grab you up, and him drunk and a spit up in you face, you know – be able to deal with them.”

Junor says that he invariably learnt to deal with people from the plethora of faces and personalities that visited his parents’ one-stop shop in Borobridge, a rural Clarendon community, when he was a boy.

The year it really started for him, though, was in 1977 when he was elected as a councillor for the Borobridge division. The following year, he was named a senator, which, Junor says has made him the longest serving parliamentarian outside of Opposition Leader Bruce Golding and Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller.

In the 1980 elections, which the PNP lost, Junor ran for the St Andrew, South East seat “as a young upstart, if you will, part of the radical left of the party”.

When he lost his bid, he opened his law practice until 1987, when Dr Paul Robertson and Michael Manley convinced him to re-enter representational politics and “seek my fortunes” in Manchester, Central. There, he beat the JLP’s Cecil Charlton, an icon in the parish, by 714 votes.

Junor has been the Member of Parliament for that constituency for 18 years , and has served in several government ministries.

But what he sensed as a desire for change among the Jamaican people, and a level of “disrespect and unctuousness”, mainly by youngsters toward politicians, that has “lessened my ardour for representational politics”, now sees Junor saying ‘so long’.

And his reflections on his life outside of and in politics are mixed. Junor calls the time he spent working as a legal secretary at the newly formed National Housing Trust, for example, a seminal experience, which guided much of his later work.

Then there was his assignment as minister of tourism, which he says was “exciting, because you were developing a tourism master plan”.

But his time as minister of local government, youth and sport Junor describes as a “very frustrating period”. I didn’t enjoy that, [because] you were given a basket to carry water in a lot of ways because the expectations out there are so high of the populace in terms of the provision of services from the parish councils, and you weren’t being funded sufficiently to deal with solid waste [for example],” Junor says.

“What I had to do as a feeling of my own self-worth and contribution [was to] focus on reform and how you try to introduce civil society in the process of governance.”

So, it was with a little apprehension, but great relief, that he took up the health portfolio in 1998.

“Mr Patterson called me to Vale Royal and as I entered, he said ‘I hope you’re feeling healthy’. and I said, ‘oh my god, please don’t tell me you’re going to give me health’, and he did.”

And even though he didn’t know much about the area, Junor again pulled up on his management experience at the NHT to oversee 24 hospitals, 345 clinics 13,000 employees, 23 unions and a $15 billion budget.

“So when I hear people talk about politicians, ‘Boy dem nuffi get no money because dem nuh duh no work’, if you look at what you doing in all like health, I laugh, but you do it,” Junor says.

Junor says, too, that the population often expects the minister to “run the place”, even when there are bureaucrats in charge of structures and specific responsibilities.

During his stint as minister of health, however, Junor recalls an experience which he says was not pleasant. It was 2003, and it emerged that there had been widespread physical and sexual abuse in children’s homes and places of safety. There were calls for his resignation as the minister with responsibility for child care.

“It wasn’t a pleasant experience; there were times when you felt despondent. The public holds you personally responsible for things that are so far removed from your chain of command, but the buck stops there.”

He says dealing with that, and another “low point” which occurred in 1996 and prompted him to resign as then minister of tourism, involved first clearing himself of guilt.

“You listen to the criticism and it hurts, of course it hurts. Once you clear yourself, your job then is how do you seek to institute measures that would further try to prevent the malady that has happened and go about that to the best of your ability,” Junor says.

“There is a sense in which you have to be a very secure person as a politician. You have to be comfortable in your own skin.”

The “low point” which saw Junor before the courts on two counts of discharging his licensed firearm in public, came about when he says he stopped at a bar in his constituency and came under attack by a group of men who had earlier been verbally abusive.

“And they really became extremely threatening and I reached for my firearm and fired it, because I was under attack – and again, the adversarial nature of our politics. My opponents sought to make heavy weather of the fact that I had fired my gun. The police charged me, and I resigned as a minister.

“It’s not a good feeling, and then everybody start calling you ‘John Wayne’. It’s not a nice feeling, clearly not, but in your own mind, you say, did I do anything wrong?”

Junor was later found not guilty of the charges as it was determined that he had been acting in self-defence.

Junor chastises journalists for not having called him to get his account of the happenings, but praises his family, including his wife of 38 years, Urla, for supporting him.

But all that is behind him now, and Junor looks to the future.

He wants to spend at least 10 more years in practicing law and “thereafter, I’ll see”.

He spends his down time travelling, being with his grandchildren, reading, hanging with his friends and his dogs and cooking. And of course going to Carnival.

“This weekend I tried a new barbecue sauce and my granddaughter, said ‘Grandpa, on my birthday, I want you to cook barbecue chicken’,”

This 61-year-old grandfather of six youngsters, wants to see them grow and get married.

He has a dream too, of building a “cool out” farm house in the country, on land he has already identified, with a view of the South Coast.

“I would like to build a small house there with a big verandah, that can hold everybody and grow some goats, plant peas, it’s a dream of mine. My wife doan believe me, she’s a city girl. It’s the one thing I’ve not been able to convince her about yet, that move to the rural parts,” Junor says laughing.

“I have enjoyed my life,” he says after the laughter has subsided. “You slide down the bannister, and get some splinters in you hand, but what you goin do?