Thank you all for your many and ( extremely) varied responses some of which made me laugh and some which gave me pause for thought..thanks Christina.

As I said, the white border is not something I wish to be using buit until such time as Flcker pull the collective 'finger out' and give us some decent seperation between images on our photostreams then it ( or something like it) needs to stay.

For those of you with flcker accounts who haven't visited them lately...they are planning YET another change in display which looks to be even worse, were it possible, than the current incarnation. Go make your voices heard folks!