I have to admit that this is all going over my head at my current level of understanding.
I have however managed to dig out an old post which has helped me achieve what I wanted to do. The post is help using the time library on ESP32
I can find the constituent parts of the time with
timeinfo.tm_sec
etc.
For a beginner, the most useful part of a library is a really good Readme file in the library folder. I can’t find one though for the time.h folder.
Thanks for every bodies help.