Flag waving castle… my graphics board doesn’t have a GPU capable of taking on the mantle of rendering (apparently) so ‘cycles’ was estimating 3 hours to do the render… This is the Eevee render which is better than I could draw. 
For Cycles, lower your image size. Fewer samples and switch on denoiser.
But yes, Eevee is your best friend and is capable of doing very nice illustrations.
But it takes more properties adjustments and understanding of how Eevee works.
Just have fun and learn to work with Blender.
Reducing the size of the render is something I was hunting for… sadly that 3 hour estimate was with the denoiser on! LOL My PC is something like 10 years old, at the time I put it together to make the most of Poser 3D and Hexagon modeller, the Intel i7-2600 had just been released and it was a pretty lively system back then. It spends most of its life running Linux these days, but I still have dual boot with Windows enabled to continue with the odd application that doesn’t have a Linux equivalent.
I’m using the Windows partitions for doing this Blender course—mostly because I thought it’d have better support for my graphics card, an NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450! It looks like even this is too old. 
Good castle.
Blender site has info on computer minimum requirements and recommended etc.
There is also something about what graphics cards can work. I suspect yours is pre Cuda. So Cpu rendering will be used.
Interestingly Linux Blender supposedly renders a bit faster. Linux stuff is all beyond me, but it sounds like you would be able to work it out.
Size of render, Output properties tab, Format, Resolution.
Thanks @NP5 I got that render size thing now
I’ll copy everything over the the Linux partition tomorrow and see if there is an appreciable difference. The beauty of Open Source Software!
Night all. 
Just about to lose an hour… hehe
Well I got everything copied over to my Linux partition… then found I had Blender V2.78 installed—and it refused point blank to upgrade!! I had to uninstall it and reinstall the V3.1.0 before it would take. 
It still doesn’t like my graphics card as far as Cycles is concerned (but on the other hand at least it doesn’t just crash out like my laptop telling me that the card isn’t supported at all), but it does seem to be somewhat more sprightly than under Windows. Nice.
Thanks for the pointers, I’m sure there’s more improvements to be had as I go along.
