Another long morning talking to Martin from Apple. He is very determined but after over an hour and a half phone call with him, the iCloud issue was still not fixed.
I decided to give up for the day on working on a resolution and turned to paperwork, invoicing, emailing etc which at least I know I can do!
Martin had suggested that I could do with a different keyboard to enable me to do what I needed to do as a Bluetooth keyboard is not recognised by the Mac when it very first switches on but unfortunately we don't have a spare keyboard. However, a brief note on the Crescent WhatsApp group lead to our neighbour a couple of doors away offering the use of his PC keyboard. I used this to follow Martin’s suggestion of a ‘soft reset’ of the software and although the keyboard worked perfectly, the end result did not change the original problem. Back to square one.