Sussed it. Remembered that the visual Editor is what mangles the emded code. turned that off, and away we go.
As Helen has shown, later versions of WordPress don’t suffer the bug (Frantic Gardner is on WP 2.2, this is still running 2.0, ought to upgrade it, current version 2.21)
It was hare to start with.
.
oops, I made Chris into a butterfly.
a bird now
And now a hare!