I spent today on an emergency aid course at work, run by the St John Ambulance people. It was useful, I think. Very basic, but now at least I have a set of rules to follow if someone suddenly collapses. Or cuts themself horribly. Or starts to choke. I keep asking the family to let me practise CPR on them - I want to see how it feels to do CPR on a person as opposed to one of those creepy dummies - but they all refuse. I wonder why.

It was interesting, and sort of disconcerting, to see that when accidents and blood and so forth were discussed the idea of HIV infection didn't seem to even cross most people's minds, except as a very unlikely, academic sort of threat. Very different to the reaction of someone from sub-saharan Africa. But then, the risk levels are different over here. These South African statistics are pretty grim - the 2005 national survey suggests that 33.3% of all women there aged between 25 and 29 are HIV positive, and about 5.5 million people are living with HIV. Whereas here, the statistics seem to suggest that there are only about 63 500 HIV positive people in the country. I just wish that HIV positive South Africans all had access to the same drugs that HIV positive British people receive.