> if anyone knows of an introduction to the basic fundamentals of calculus that a motivated but under educated maths gronk can grok, I would gratefully appreciate a link or ten.

"The basic fundamentals of calculus" usually go under the name "real analysis".

You have many options for studying it.

MIT OpenCourseWare: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-100a-real-analysis-fall-2020/

Free calculus-through-nonstandard-analysis textbook: https://people.math.wisc.edu/~hkeisler/calc.html

Lean4 game implementing Alex Kontorovich's undergrad course: https://adam.math.hhu.de/#/g/alexkontorovich/realanalysisgam... (also includes videos of the course lectures)

I like the idea of the lean4 game, because if you do your work in lean you'll know whether you've made a mistake.

("Standard analysis" uses limiting behavior to ask what would happen if we were working with infinitely large or infinitesimally small values, even though of course we aren't really. "Nonstandard analysis" doesn't bother pretending and really uses infinitely large and infinitesimally small values. Other than the notational difference, they are the same, and a proof in one approach can be easily and mechanistically converted into the same proof in the other approach.)

Note that the ordinary course of study involves learning to do calculus problems first (in a "calculus" class), and studying the fundamentals second (in an "analysis" class). The textbook I linked is a "calculus" textbook, but there is a bit more focus on the theoretical backing because you can't rely on the student to learn about nonstandard analysis somewhere else.