Have you seen the latest commemorative stamps? As the royal mail said when introducing them: ‘In a little over a century, British doctors and scientists have made a series of startling breakthroughs' - and the stamps rather beautifully depict those breakthroughs - beta blockers, penicillin, the Charnley hip replacement, lens implants, the understanding of malarial transmission, and CT scanners.

So where are the British GPs in all this? I'm not denying the astonishing scientific achievements that these discoveries represent. But I'm always struck that we do 90% of the work of the NHS, caring for most of the health problems of most of the population most of the time. We are becoming busier every year, and clearly offering something that the public appreciates, expects, and demands.

I can't think of a single week in the three decades of my professional career when I haven't had more work to do than I could readily complete, so we must be doing something that matters to people.

So, if one day the Royal Mail were to notice our frenetic backwater of the medical universe, what half dozen images might sum up most clearly just what it is we do?

• The stethoscope - It might be a cliché, but clichés don't become clichés if they don't carry a semblance of truth. Stethoscopes still define doctors, even if modern imaging has made us realise that they aren't really half as useful as we once thought - and they will always give us the advantage of time to think about what to do while the patient stops talking
• The sphygmomanometer - It would probably be electronic, though many of us miss the ability to round down the pressure in the overtly anxious patient that the secrecy of the mercury sphyg gave us. Fraudulent? Discuss
• The practice team - without whom we simply couldn't function
• The look of puzzlement on the doctor's face - as yet another set of symptoms fits not a single recognisable category
• The cold cup of coffee - that we tried to drink between patients, before we got sidetracked by something less essential
• The handshake of introduction and welcome - that makes the consultation both human and personal

But somehow they don't work either, any more than an image of a hip prosthesis can describe the complexity of what our secondary care colleagues really get up to day to day. One of the great problems of general practice is that it looks straightforward while being astonishingly complex. When you sit down at the start of a morning surgery, you will have not the slightest idea about what the next couple of hours might bring.

I recently had a new trainee sit in with me for a first surgery, and in the course of a single morning realised we had seen patients who might otherwise have been seen in the following specialties: paediatrics; obstetrics; ENT; psychogeriatrics; cardiology; psychiatry; orthopaedics; and gynaecology.

If we didn't do it day in and day out, it might make our head spin. Indeed, despite doing it day in and day out, there are still occasions when it does make my head spin.

So, how to describe this in a single image? A spinning head would have too many echoes of The Exorcist, so perhaps we'll have to do with something more abstract. I've always liked the RCGP's symbol of wisdom, the owl, though some cruel and unjust jibes have been made that it would be a better symbol if we did more night visits. So what's it to be? A computer or a cardigan? A computer in a cardigan? Or maybe just a spectrum - after all, that's what we are. Any ideas?