Pozzing Peter to Pay Paul

Applied for one of those AmEx (Red) credit cards in a moment of whimsy last week, uncertain whether or not I would get it, only to receive a phone call a couple of days later telling me that not only do I get one, but it starts off with a £6,500 credit limit. When I said I wasn't expecting to use the card much, the woman explained to me that even a little bit going through the card would help pay for tablets for women to ensure that their children aren't going to be HIV+. Noble, I say, and I certainly don't disagree with it, but there's a funny way that giving money to other positive people in Africa brings up some odd dissonance in me. Putting aside the way that the money is focused on women and children, implying that men are the vectors of this disease and that charity generally is a double-edged sword, there's also the strange sense that it makes it an alien problem somehow.

Something like 46% of new HIV cases in the UK were among gay men. Apparently 30% of infections among gay men are undiagnosed, too, so the figures are higher. Gay Times this month ran an article about how many gay men there actually are in the UK as a percentage of the population. Their conclusion? Two. Two percent of the UK population are accounting for almost half of the new diagnoses of HIV in the UK. t's quite a scary proportion when you think about it and really does rather put paid to the general tendency to reinforce the message that HIV isn't just a gay plague. It certainly seems that way, doesn't it?

I'm wondering if I should try to take advantage of my own situation a little more. At the moment, I have only a tiny flat - I can't help but wonder if there's a way I could use my HIV status and the co-morbid depression to try to get a little more space to live in rather than the little pod I'm in right now. Perhaps I should pay a visit to a few housing associations in Lambeth, but I fear they're not going to be bending over backwards to help. Still, might be worth a try.

I'm also doing to start back at acupuncture and try to make myself head back to where I was, physically, nearer to the beginning of the year, getting regular acupuncture, not drinking or taking drugs, not smoking and exercising a lot. I've let slip on that and I think the numbers reflect that. Kind of falling into a pattern of not self-destruct, but perhaps a little bit of neglect - drinking, smoking, sleeping around. It's not something I'd find particularly appealing in another man and it's a distraction from career stuff.

But so is the drilling in the wall next to where I'm sitting at home. God, I want to have a better place to live.