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Went for bloods last month and, well, I've only got a few more little soldiers than Leonidas had. Soon, it seems, my viral load shall blot out the sun and we shall fight in the shade. Got to repeat the blood test soon but sounds like those years I thought I had left before I'd have to start on medication are fewer than I'd hoped in number.

The Western Front

...all quiet.

The clamour, the shock, the newsworthiness of it all fell away. I had a boyfriend who was so terrified of infection that he started to desire it, I had another boyfriend for whom I was his first, which was weird - the virgin and the whore - then I think I've given up looking for salvation between the legs of innocent men. This is no bad thing, I reckon. I'm just ticking over now. Considering what's important. Stability, unfortunately, doesn't seem to automatically include someone else as part of that equation. I'm getting places career-wise I'd not thought I'd get to. I get on better with my ex now than I think I did when we got into all this silly mess. My heart's in a holding pattern. Sure, I do keep finding myself spending time with this one guy, but I think the slightest whisper of belonging would be enough to send me running for the hills right now.

I'm slightly annoyed with myself for over-disclosing in the earlier stages of this. People I barely know start asking me how I got it.

"I know this guy who said he got it from a blow job. I mean, is that possible? How did you get it?"

"Bareback double anal."

The conversation doesn't often go further than that. Funny, really, how people's perceptions of you change according to how they think you were infected. I'm a nice man - now, at least - so surely I'm a victim of this. Heh. As if. If anything, as I mentioned before, this saved my life in several ways. Or, least, it shook things up a little bit.

Anyhow, hello. As I said, nothing really to report here just yet. Am going with a friend for him to get tested in a couple of weeks. I'm not really sure I'm best qualified for this, only that I'd be able to find good things in either result. It's odd, though, that sense of seeing someone's fear of becoming what I am already. Strange days.

Updating You

Not sure if this blog fell off everyone's radars this last month or two. When I changed over to blogger beta, it linked everything together through my gmail account and it became quite easy to get to my identity through this, which isn't something I was really prepared to risk, so I made the blog private for a little while. It's sorted now, so things should be ok.

That said, as much as no news is good news, good news is no news, so there's not been that much to say on here of late.

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These results are starting to sound like buses. Another set of bloods back, another reassurance that nothing's happening yet that needs any kind of intervention. Given that there's plenty of friends of mine who have had it for a decade, or longer, who don't need medication, I wonder if perhaps I was a bit of a fool to think there was any point in thinking about the infection at all. Sure, it's a pain, and it's certainly a factor that damages relationships for me - not because of their fear of me infecting them, but more because of my own anxiety about it meaning I'm left overcompensating, hoping that they'll like me in spite of the virus.

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.