A big thanks for all your replies. This was my first post on PPrune and it's great that so many are keen to help out.
I'm thinking seriously of transferring my PPL training to Naples in Jan/Feb 2003, mainly to avoid the British weather, so I guess I'll have a different R/T challenge over there. I'm sure there's nothing to it - but for me it's the one side of aviation that I had absolutely no knowledge about before I decided I should stop dreaming and start doing.
One final point on R/T - presumably, once I have an R/T licence it becomes completely legal to listen in?