So I went home last night brimming with confidence that I had enough ammo to sort this problem out.......wrong! I spent the best part of three hours trying this and that and all I ended up achieving was giving myself a headache.
Today, I went back to Tesco's where I bought the item from and a very helpful tech guy looked at it, scratched his head and phoned Apple support.
After what appeared to be an age (it was 45 minutes) he put the phone on hold, turned to me and told me that it was a known Apple problem, there was nothing wrong with the IPad and that it was something to do with linking the unit to the servers at Apple. He told me Apple have known about this problem for ages and they haven't got much of an idea on how to cure it. He also said that it could be 24 hours or up to a month before anything got done about it.
Well, there it is.
Apple are selling products which they know are not fit for purpose 
(this is particularly applicable to me as I bought it so me and mine could talk whilst I was away from home).
I got my money back and will seriously consider whether to purchase another Apple product in the future.