Neither I nor mrs twm work now.
My mum, now quite elderly, "inherited" a box of at least a dozen Leica cameras about 10 years ago, maybe a bit more, along with some bits and pieces of Leica "kit". They came from someone who had bought them from dealers who specialised in old cameras for camera collectors. Some of the Leicas went back to the 1930s. She didn't need them or want to use them and, in the end, she sold them to a younger relative of the person who had gifted them to her in the first place. She felt this was the right thing to do, even if it was not necessarily the most lucrative.
Myself, I got given a Canon "bridge" camera for a significant birthday a few years back. Though it is not the sort of standard you guys have, it was a significnat step up from what I had before and I am broadly very pleased with the results. It has the option of a viewfinder, which I so much prefer that I almost never use the screen, though the latter is rotatable which allows overhead shots (for example, a photo of Patti Smith taken over the heads of the crowd at a speak-and-play session at a FNAC in Paris - not a great picture but, without that facility, I would never had got a shot at all). I find the camera versatile but, IMHO, it is not so good in low light situations (such as concerts, of course) though I am pleased with many of the results. The camera comes with a 12x optical zoom and I've bought an attachment that takes that up to 18x optical. The latter gives great depth of field results (that is, a "sharp" subject standing out against a blurred background). In my youth, I knocked about with some people who were semi-professional photographers, so got the chance to use some of their equipment - back in the days before automatic focussing and camera settings.
