I was thinking about getting a digital camera before this year's holiday (yet another tour around southen Africa, with visits to family and old friends). In the end, I bought a digital camcorder for considerably less than the digital SLR I originally had in mind. Two things helped swing me to this decision:

- flowers are difficult to photograph when there's any breeze. A video often conveys more of the atmosphere.

- I'm determined to avoid any further encounters with my mad Irish neighbour unless I have an independent witness present, or I can record the event. More about that another day. I'm thinking about identifying him, to see if anyone else has encountered him (in Roumania or Italy, for a start).

In my local Carrefour hypermarket, I found a JVC Everio digital camcorder for 400 Euros. The functions available on comparatively low-level modern camcorders amaze me. This little beast almost fits in the palm of my hand, but it has 34 times optical zoom (I use it in a mode that gives me 64 times zoom, which the image stabilisation makes just about usable - I'd definitely need a tripod for the next mode up).

Its default mode provides HDTV resolution for 7 hours of recording on its built-in hard drive (even the biggest available battery runs out long before that). I can also use SD cards, but they are barely quick enough to cope, and only hold about 1/7th as much.

The biggest problem I had was finding out how to do everything (it took me three days to understand how the menu worked. There's room for improvement in the manual, but it's better than the on efor the MP3 player I bought at the same time, which still has functions I don't know how to drive - and all I'm doing is using it as a voice recorder).

I have made masses of video clips of life around here and downloaded them to my PC. Now comes the hard bit - editing and producing my first video.

I've started off very simply, with a 24-second unmodified scene and a bit of voiceover, intended for my 2-year-old granddaughter. (She might be less critical than the folks for whom I hope one day to produce videos). Already, I've learned two things that I must correct before the next effort:

• It was a windy day. The camcorder has a wind noise suppression function. I must learn to use it.
• I need to set the voiceover recording volume appropriately, and practice speaking at the right volume (I'll also have to modify my style to suit the intended audience)

Well - I have a long way to go to catch up with Marty Scorsese, but I've moved up one rung from the webcam effort below (my mad Irishman causing a disturbance in order to make the dogs bark).

That's it for now. My next project is to combine two or three clips of our little flock of sheep and their lambs - once more for the amusement of 2-year-old granddaughter Dylan.