Right, I think the locale is now configured correctly. And I think/hope that the time zones are now OK too - I noticed earlier that my messages were set 5 hours into the future.
I rummaged around in KDE and the Mandrake Control Centre and noticed that, although I had specified during the install that I am in the UK, some areas of good ol' MDK8.0 was of the opinion that I was somewhere undefined in Africa. Although I don't believe that there is a 5-hour time difference between GMT and anywhere in Africa. More likely the US east coast (EDT ?).
It does seem to muddle a lot of things. And yes, I know lots of you are sniggering 'that's why we install debian instead." Well, maybe sometime although I may try Suse first.
Anyway, with a bit of luck the current message will actually appear in the correct chronological order :) And that's enough for one day, I think. I've spent quite a few hours on this, time that I really should have been doing other things. God, this is like going back years to when I first fiddled about with DOS, learning how to set things up. Unfortunately I just don't have as much free time to play around with these days so I don't know if I shall realistically be able to persist with this.
Regards Syd