Re: /usepackage{babel}

> However the default language for my document I'm writing is British. How
> can I load British to get the British hyphenation pattern? Many thanks!

At the time when teTeX-3.0 was done, the file ukhyphen.tex did not have
a license that allowed inclusion into teTeX.

It is available now, so download it into tex/generic/hyphen,run texhash
and set it up as british in the babel configuration, e.g. by running
  texconfig hyphen latex
and add

    %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
    % UK english, TWO LINES! To enable these lines, remove %! and the space.
    %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
    british  ukhyphen.tex
    =UKenglish

    % english should always be defined. Either an alias for american or british.
    =english

Thomas