Gorillas and Jason Bourne

I'm no photographer...all that mumbo-jumbo about 'f' stops, focal plane shutters and depth of field sounds like one of the black arts and leaves me very, very confused, not an uncommon situation you might think. I need to be able to get hold of a camera, point it at the subject, press the shiny button and expect to get a half-respectable pic. I've been using a little Panasonic compact camera for the shots in the 'shop but recent attempts to take decent finished pics of the Elm Cabinet II have found it wanting somewhat. Apparently the little lenses in all these sorts of cameras are 'wide angle' (whatever that means...presumably you can shoot wide things?) which give rise to a certain amount of distortion in the finished pic, not a particularly desirable thing in pics that are going to get published in the media...and therein lies the problem.
After Michael Huntley came round the other day (who's the new editor of F&C) he asked me for a small article on the interior of the 'shop together with a dozen or so decent photos of the interesting features...plus he's going to drop of stuff for reviewing which again will require a couple of pics. This all means of course, that I'll be doing a bit more work for the mag, the end result of which is that my picture taking equipment needs to be improved a tad.
When Pete came round the other night we got talking about this problem... SWIMBO overheard the conversation and very generously offered me the use of her very gucci Olympus SLR for use in the 'shop, which was fantastic, but as others have pointed out to me, these bigger cameras require a tripod to get the best out of them so this morning I've ordered quite a natty Sony unit that was getting 5* reviews on Amazon. What's even better is that as the forthcoming holiday to the South of France (reverting to Plan A after much consideration...not definite though) is fast approaching she wanted to take pics using the self-timer of both of use so I've also ordered a Gorillapod which will also be useful in the 'shop for closer work at the bench.
At whilst I was in the mood, I decided to order a little light reading matter for the evenings, imbibed with a glass or four of nice French vino...The Bourne Trilogy!