Sorry to come to this so late. Just for the record I definitely in no way was sponsered by Leica to write that piece in the Guardian. I had my arm twisted by the picture editor to provide a blog about the camera I'd been carrying everywhere with me recently. I had never written any kind of blog/ journalistic piece before which may explain how amateur hour ish my prose was. I was asked to write about "why I love it", and then the sub editors seemed to edit in to a "worth the money" piece. I'm slightly embarrassed about that aspect of it. But I can definitively promise that I was not sponsered in any way. Actually I regretted the whole thing - I'm far too thin skinned to cope with the comments etc that came after. But it did have a silver lining in that Leica have since offered to lend [LEND not give!!] me an M9 and a couple of different lenses to use on a project I'm about to do in the US, so given that it probably was worth the hassle. Anyway, I enjoyed reading this thread. And yes, my name is a very cake-y name, but in the 1970's int he uk [when I was born] that brand wasn't known over here. Heigh ho..
