I foolishly hoped that the automated wordpress upgrade plugin would work - it hasn’t; it failed badly.
Although the site now appears ok from the outside - thanks mainly due to jumping into FTP and doing things manually - basically the entire backend of the blog is now hosed…just managing to post this “service outage” notice required excessive effort.
Hopefully in the next week or so I’ll get the chance to wipe the slate clean and do things by hand, but until then I wont be able to update as much as I like, sorry!