From National Aids Trust website:
The number of people living with HIV infection aged 50 years or over has seen a five-fold increase between 2001 and 2010 from 2,851 to 14,266. This represents one in five of all adults seen for HIV care in 2010. This rise is due to increased survival as a result of effective treatment in addition to continued transmission within this age group.
The chart shows how the number of HIV positive adults aged 50 and over in the UK has changed over time, sourced from the Health Protection Agency’s HIV New Diagnoses Surveillance Tables: Table 6.
Nearly two-thirds (62%) of older adults were diagnosed late. Adults diagnosed at age 50 years and over are more likely to present late compared with younger adults.
A few years ago Child A and I became intrigued by a monochrome canvas we saw at the Tate Modern gallery in London by the French artist Yves Klein.
The name meant nothing to me at the time, but according to c4gallery.com “he is generally considered the progenitor of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. In Klein’s short life he singlehandedly managed to redefine the foundation on which the entire generation of the 1960s avant-garde stood…” [read full article here ]
In 1958 he developed his trademark, patented, colour International Klein Blue which he claimed had a quality “close to pure space – a Blue in itself, disengaged from all functional justification”. Conveniently for dealers in fine art, the colour allegedly lies outside the gamut of computer displays, and can therefore not be accurately portrayed on webpages. That said, international-klein-blue.com gives it a shot anyway. View the page in fullscreen mode on your browser and you’ve got yourself a DIY 20th Century modernist masterpiece right there on your desktop.
According to Tate Modern Klein made around 200 untitled monochrome paintings using IKB and, after his early death at the age of 34, his widow assigned a number to each of them. The one my son and I saw was IKB 79 painted in 1959. [More]
This was the doorway to some of the wildest and most vivid memories of my younger years. I first glimpsed Jay at a crowded fringe theatre event in Notting Hill and coudn’t take my eyes off him. We were in our early thirties, both a bit raddled and the worse for wear but for me at least he had an electrifying physical attraction. He saw me looking, ambled over and casually, arrogantly, picked me up – taking me first to a Kensington nightclub so that his ex would see he’d scored and be jealous. [More]
Like most people who grew up in the 60s, I take a lot of drugs. It’s only when you chat with friends that you realise how many others are doing it. I wonder how much R&D cash at the pharmaceutical companies gets diverted from malaria and Aids these days into treatments for the acid reflux, insomnia and dodgy prostates of gents in the affluent West. That and trying to break Pfizer’s lucrative Viagra monopoly. A hard man is still good to find.
My late cousin with his family in the late sixties, looking cheeky, bright-eyed and full of promise. When he died in his early forties of an HIV-related illness his mother set up an award scheme in his memory at a London university. “Having had a drug problem in his early life, he devoted the last drug-free part of his life to helping addicts free themselves from their habits and stay drug free.” she wrote. “I want to enable his work to continue: this scholarship provides an opportunity for students accepted onto the course but who can’t afford to fund it themselves.”
