I bought a camera this evening. For a few years now I have been waiting for something to come up which will justify lashing out on a really good camera, and this, indubitably, is it. I think it is my single most expensive purchase to date, which probably tells you more about my style of accomodation etc than my camera, but which is an impressive factoid nonetheless.

It's an 8 megapixel digital Canon with kickarse zoom, blah blah blah (i.e. all the regular impressive features), and which importantly also has full manual function (to stop bright reflections from snow and ice upsetting the colour balance), ability to attach a lens hood as well as polarising and UV filters, an extra long-life battery (as the cold tends to drain them pretty quick), a gigabyte compact flash card (to store the results of the inevitable shutter-fever we'll all catch), good ergonomics (easy to operate with gloves on) and, after all that, small enough to store in a big parka pocket. Maybe.

Standing in the Electronic Goodies section of JB Hi-Fi was an interesting experience, as I found myself forced by the mad explosion of recent technologies to make interesting and complex decisions. Such as: do I get a smaller storage card in my camera and just download everything more regularly to my laptop hard drive? - In which case, will my hard drive get full with MP3s and photos? - Perhaps I should keep my music on CDs, take my Discman for music instead, and use the computer for photo storage - or else I could get a hard-disk MP3 player, store my photos and music on it and use it as an external hard drive for my laptop - or I could get a separate, dedicated external hard drive, get a solid-state memory MP3 player for music and use my laptop as my main music storage system. Conclusion: leisure time, pocket money, music and photos are a complicated business, way out of proportion to their actual importance.