Hi Juan, Stephen, Manni, Lance and Rick! Thank You All for the great comments and encouragement! Yes, it's curiously liberating just to build and not get obsessed by the finer details or techniques - just to use what's in the box and forge ahead every day! It has been fun - and the response from the great Modellers on the site has helped - please forgive my errors! I think every modeller should try one of these once in a while...
Well, on with the build, the masking came off and I meant to take a photo but I forgot... Then I examined the finer details of the red and white masking... unfortunately, just at the leading edges of the upper wing white square and the leading edge of the lower wing leading edge the division between the red and white looked a bit rough... it took me a while to work out what had gone wrong, and t was an error way back... The leading edge of every wing has a mould separation line and I was careful to remove that, but due to the (red) transparent plastic and my inattention I didn't realize the underlying plastic near this mould line was a bit rough... I should have examined it with some magnification and simply fixed it by an application of surface primer and a sanding down with some very fine sand-paper, say 1000 grit... that would have cured it and made the paint soo much smoother... Well, I won't lose sleep over it, the first place where paint (or dope) wears or chips on a real aeroplane is the leading edge of the wing, built in weathering!
Then straight on to the decals... usually I will coat with gloss acrylic Tamiya then wait til it hardens properly then apply decals but time is running away from me! So decals go straight onto the relatively glossy paint... should be OK, says Marc crossing his fingers! My good friend Tony Dill (AKA the Great Dillini ... long story) gave me some decals for Lt Weiss's Tripe... and the crosses were perfect for this! The only slight problem was the white border to the upper and lower wing crosses, no problem! Just ignore! It all seemed to work OK... remember, if you catch a glimpse of that white border, remember these crosses were modified, over-painted and touched up a few times at this stage of the war!

So this is where we are, just one modelling session, but the colours are starting to pop!
Regards,
Marc