Thank you for all the replies. Teamviewer certainly gets a lot of mentions!

I'm not discounting using Teamviewer or any other piece of third-party software but given Remote Desktop and the RDP is built into Windows I thought I'd give it a go. I don't know what happened the first time I lost connection because after a restart it worked again but after the second occasion I realised that my public IP was changing so I didn't have the correct address to login with. If I stop that from happening then RDP will be all I need. I have a few questions about accessing RDP through a VPN but i'll start a new topic for that.