I'm sitting here ...

... in the waiting room of the swimming baths in Loretteville, Québec - about 20kms from Québec City. It opens in about 45 minutes and I shall be the first in. I look like something that the cat has just dragged in through the cat flap and spilling half a mug of cold coffee over my clothes this morning has not helped

"And Québec City?" I hear you say. Yes - nearest camera repairers to anywhere along the Lower North Shore and so I had no option but a 920km (I measured it) drive through the night to get here. So now the camera is in good hands and it's a question of "wait and see".

Luckily, Walmart is offering a special this week - the obsolete Nikon D3000 (the model one or two lower down the scale than mine) with a cheap lens, for just $420 and so that is the fallback position if nothing else works. At least, it takes all of my lenses and accessories so that's a good thing.

In the meantime I've been manfully ... "personfully" - ed ... keeping on with the camera in the Samsung mobile phone that I bought over here last year. And while it's not a patch on the real thing, it's not disappointing me at all.

When I remember the journey that I did all around the Rockies and the American desert in 2002 with a second-hand Fuji Finepix, it is in fact in some respects a big leap forward from those days. But the days of up-market digital SLR cameras has spolit me, I suppose.

But seeing this pic of the meltwater from the Canadian Shield cascading in full fury over the dam at Magpie shows that it can do the business well enough in the right kind of conditions and I can't ask any more of it than that.

And now having been told that I need a bonnet for the swimming baths, I suppose that I had better sod off and buy one.

Watch this space.