Thanks for the replies, it's made me feel better.
I did actually get through to the doctor in the end - to be fair, she is great, pro HRt (she takes it herself) and very supportive. i've seen some posters on here have difficulty getting the help they need from their docs so I know I'm lucky in that respect.
She told me to come off it for a few weeks and give my body a break, then she'll sort a full check with a gynae and take it from there. She says nothing really bad will happen if I stop for a few a month and then come back and see her, and if I'm still bleeding in ten days she wants to know about it.
To be honest I'm happy to sit on the 0.25/.5 and put up with the spotting. I didn't realise it could last up to 6 months and I'd only been taking it for 4. it was the full on flooding that started up with the.5/1 increase that I wasn't happy about. It was flippin' painful if nothing else! spotting - well, it's a bit meh but I can live with it if I know it's nothing sinister.
So I'm going to be back to square one now.
I did wonder if I'd started on conti too soon. Sure, I hadn't had a period for 14 months when I started, but that's barely over the required 1 year without. And I had had some spotting 7 months in, so maybe a sequi would have been better. I assumed that spotting within that no period year didn't really count.
One question - with spotting on HRT in the first 6 months. I was getting it at random times - like sometimes I'd have a 2 week break, or 3, or ten days. It didn't seem to have a pattern or cycle. Is that also normal?