It's never just a cold.

It's that time of year in London now, when everyone gets ill. In my office, about three people all have the same cough I've had for the last week or so and we're all consoling one another with hot drinks with honey and lemon in, necking paracetamol and any drug marketed at the winter sick every half an hour and making half-arsed runs to the shop to buy oranges. They talk about echinacea and I am always so tempted to say, "I find antiretrovirals so much better than echinacea!"

But it wouldn't be true. I'm not on treatment, and I'm hoping I won't have to be for a little time yet. Still, this is my first winter with the virus and it seems to fuel every bit of latent hypochondrea that I'm sure every man has. I don't know how much credence I give to the thought that men suffer illness with less grace than women, I know I'm not convinced it's the flu when it's probably a minor throat infection I've got, but then I just joined a mailing list that emails you every few days with some fascinating information about the virus.

It's a horribly depressing thing to have inflicted upon myself as not only is anyone reading the stuff about symptoms of HIV going to be convinced they're positive - a few people I've shown it to have been quite disturbed by the number of "symptoms of HIV" they have. For me, though, I look at the symptoms of TB, night sweats, a cough that's worse at night and such and I'm convinced that my chesty cough (worse at night because the phlegm settles) is the most terrifying thing it could possibly be.

I suppose I can unpick this thinking a little: I've been through a hell of a lot over the last six months, diagnosis, the breakdown of the relationship I thought would last forever, moving flat, starting a new job and I've not really been able to grieve for any of this out of the ongoing sense that I don't want to upset other people by presenting my diagnosis as anything more than inconvenient, so I wind up becoming emotionally distant and rely on hiding in plain sight, telling people supposedly revelatory things about myself that actually matter not one whit to me.

I never was very good at that game where you fall back with your eyes closed and trust that you'll be caught. I'm usually taller and heavier than whoever's meant to catch me and I worry I'll crush them when I fall.