THAT is what was slowing down the page display
The MEDW site was always a little slow responding and I had just lived with it, but trying to debug why the Blogs posts were not displaying properly in the right hand menu I noticed that the blog pages were almost instant in displaying. It turns out that the image displays being shown in the right hand column were the source of the delay. I will have to investigate just why it is eating up so much time, but for the moment I've just switched it off. At least now I can work on new material without having to wait for every save.