"when I see a slow page on my site I feed it through Google and it comes-up instantly and faster than the original link"

Could be the boringly pedestrian explanation that the first time you visit it you load it from the server, but the second time it's already in your browser's cache?

traceroute says about 17ms here.

The site seems to load straight away, but it's got a horrid distracting floaty thing that drops down the screen telling me today's the first Wednesday and making me unwilling to attempt to read anything on the site.

Anahata