Thanks John - I did a very basic align (ie altitude set to 33deg, pointed basically south) - so I'd know easily if it slewed the wrong way.... The date format is unusual (yymm.dd from memory....), had to look that up in the manual....
I am getting the hang of the align and additional align menus now - did seem unintuitive initially though....
I didn't read the bit about doing several on one side of the meridian first, and was hop-scotching back and forth across it doing aligns - that's when I missed the moon on a goto I think
I figure I'll use Gemini to get as close to the pole as possible, then drift align to get the gold.... I'm only going to start some basic piggyback imaging soon, so I'm not starting drift aligning yet!