My new best friend

Presents are in, families visited, and Christmas is over. Well, not that we've actually eaten all the Christmas food, or taken down the tree, or cleared much of the rubbish, or posted any Thank You letters, but nevertheless Christmas is finished. Kaput. Gone for another year. The holiday time is over. Yes, it is. I know it's still December.

(This is me trying to convince myself that the time has come to start my holiday work/revision.)

I have joined the elite clique (comprising most of the world, apparently) whose members are given socks for Christmas. It wasn't that surprising given that I've been moaning about my toes turning to ice when waiting at cold bus stops of a morning, despite the tights (under trousers), cotton socks and thick men's socks (Kevin's) that I habitually wear in the winter. Hopefully some nice 100% wool socks will help...

I actually found my Dad's Christmas present in August by chance, browsing in Ottakars when they had a 75% off sale. I found a set of Spike Milligan audiobooks, comprising three of his books and read by him. Wait, not only read by him, but signed by him. Limited edition, 28 of 2000. A shrinkwrapped Spike Milligan signature, for only £15. Oh, and three audiobooks, of course.

The most annoying thing was not being able to blog about it until now :-)

My main present this year came from Kevin — a pick-your-own digital camera voucher (ie. I could choose a digital camera costing about £X, and Kevin would pay for it). It was really the entry-level cameras I was looking at, since a) digital cameras are expensive beasties, and b) I'm not the world's greatest nor most enthusiastic photographer, so I was pretty much looking for something "point and click"-y; fool-proof.

One of the reasons that I've never bought a digital camera (until now) is that I resent having to pay £100 for the very cheapest, most basic model that, in my inexpert hands, isn't really going to produce very good results. And until you start paying about double that, almost every camera on the market has only a 3x optical zoom, which is alright, but not great. However, with my nice Christmas present £X voucher, I could pay some towards it and get a rather decent camera that's good enough to make up for my failings.

The first camera I started lusting after was the Fuji FinePix S3500, a lovely compact camera for under £150 and with a 6x optical zoom. Perfect! Unfortunately, as I found out when I started hunting for one online, it's an end-of-line model, and as such, no one sells it any more. (Except for Tesco, at a stupendously marked-up price.)

I then decided that whatever camera I bought would have a good deal more than 3x zoom, since I've often found that to be a limiting factor when borrowing Kevin's camera. Within a few minutes I found myself drooling over Fuji's S5600, with 10x zoom! Checking out the prices online revealed that, alas, the cheapest price from companies I had heard of were from Currys/Dixons/PC World. (Also Jessops, to be fair, but their in-store price was £56 more, and I wanted to go and buy one as soon as possible.) Could I bear the shame and indignity of buying a semi-serious camera from Currys or PC World?

I could and I did. We headed out to a retail park with one of each, and started hunting. To my consternation, Currys didn't have the camera I wanted, but did have the S3500 (the end-of-line one) for only £99! Sweet bargainy goodness! Unfortunately (grrr) we were told that they didn't have any in stock, and couldn't sell me the display model since they didn't even have a box for it. Oh well.

Heading next door to PC World revealed the same conundrum (camera for £99, none in stock, can't sell us the display model), but they did have the S5600 that I had previously decided to buy.

Reader, I bought it. I spent all of last night playing with it, and exclaiming at the resonably good shots that my pointing and clicking produced, and today Kevin and I drove to Warwick university to wander around the lakes (which we discovered were mostly frozen over) and take pretty pictures in the remains of the snow. The results of today are on Flickr now. (Unfortunately I only had the memory card that came with the camera (16MB), so had to reduce the resolution down to 640x480 to fit more than 100 frames on the card. A 256MB card should be arriving soon :-) )