I'm going with the procedure that you recommend with maybe a few 'interested passenger' details between now and finishing training. Awesome.
You might want to talk to your insurance about this, 'cause it might actually help you.
Formally, until you are qualified as a PPL(M) through a sign-off from a qualified instructor, you can't log any hours in the microlight, other than those flown with an instructor (or on a solo endorsement from said instructor). However, if you are legally just a passenger you could log them as "supernumery" in your logbook. You can't claim those hours for any legal purpose (such as revalidation of a class rating), but if you can convince the insurance that for 90% of the time you were actually handling the controls, you might just be able to subtract some of that time from the five hours the insurance requires.
This is one of those things where having a good relation with your insurance may help a lot.
Lasors can be obtained online (as PDF) from the CAA website. It's the first hit in Google actually.