Exquisite table manners

What a day!

I completed my first ever tax return on line. I know. Yes, I really am as old as you think I am - but please don't scoff.  The thing is that for years my tax affairs were so straightforward I didn't have to do one at all; and then the accountant we have for the business did it for me. But this year I decided it was time to man up and do it myself. Took hours. I kept checking and rechecking everything, and adding and re-adding, and printing everything off so I could go through it again....  I was toadally zorsted by the end of it all.

So, eventually I got to a page that said "We think we owe you some money." And I thought "Cool! That's what I think too!" And then it said "Would you like us to show you how we did our calculation?" And I said "OK then - show me."

Big mistake.

It was like one of those things where you take away your age in years from the sum of the last England cricket score and the number of pounds in a ton, then divide by the number of days in a leap-year February and get 17. Almost nothing on the page seemed to bear any relation to what I thought I'd told them. So I had to go back to the beginning and check it all again......

Somewhere in the midst of the chaos and confusion, I took some time out to go on a little garden photo safari - and came back with 130 shots. It was one of those rare days when you keep seeing interesting things - several nice flowers, a couple of butterflies, a wasp which made me shudder even as I was photographing it, and a hoverfly I'd never seen before - and then, as I was making my way back to the house, a couple of juvenile birds bold enough to keep eating peanuts while I photographed them. I thought they were both great tits until I uploaded the shots, but then I realised that the smaller one was a completely different colour, and a little research made me almost certain that it was a coal tit.

I especially like this shot because the young great tit is holding one claw out in a way that reminds me of a refined lady, keeping her little finger raised as she drinks tea from a tiny, delicate cup. (So unlike my unrefined self, with my pint mug that almost requires both hands to lift it.) The first extra is the (supposed) coal tit; and the second shows them both together, with the coal tit staying a safe distance from the great tit - which rather forgot its company manners when it came to sharing food.

OK - enough about me, and on to you. There were a lot of really nice entries for Wide-angle Wednesday this week; having chosen my winners I've struggled to reduce the number of Honourable Mentions to a sensible number, and in the end (and in the interest of me getting to bed at some point) I've decided to list nine HMs. Many thanks to all of you who played - and I hope that your knees and backs have recovered, and that no cameras have suffered too badly from water or sand damage!

In the order that they come off the tag search, my hearts this week go to:

Skeena - there are so many points of interest in this that I keep finding new ones, and Skeena's processing has brought them all out beautifully.

lovelupins17 - this conveys a sense of the space in the gallery, and the exhibition is so distanced it pulls me and makes me want to visit it.

suejay50 - this is unusual in being a portrait shot, but works brilliantly in showing us the high as well as the low. Lovely gull placement too!

flying - this is so much about light and colour that it's almost abstract - and yet, I can almost feel the texture of the wet, pebbly sand.

hesscat - it's not just about the cuteness overload - this is beautifully composed, with interest right through the frame.

And now the Honourable Mentions:

For making me feel as though I'm sitting on sand, rainie and lizellen.

For great leading lines and convergence, ninniex and chrisF.

For making me think I should be wearing waterproofs, Bom, RockArea and wall.

For being smiled down at by a handsome deerhound, Beachcomber149.

And now the bad news: there will be no WAW next week, because hobbs feels it should be put to rest, at least for a while. As he said to me the other day, he began this challenge as a tutorial and awareness-raising exercise, and never intended that it should become a permanent fixture in the calendar. I'm sure you'd all like to join me in thanking him for coming up with the idea, and for running the first few weeks of the challenge in such a way that we all found ourselves learning more about our wide lenses from each topic. It's been great fun, and has helped many of us to build our skills - so thank you hobbs!