there are up to five passwords (I think), include wildcards, they could be any combination and some passwords that I use may not be there at all.
Do you mean you have a long list of passwords and your passphrase is between one and five of them? I can help with that. What do you mean by "include wildcards"?
Can you provide a list of samples of what they would look like? You can substitute different words in. It'd make it easier to see what you're describing.
hotel18461846, caravan*1, thinkpad*1 lenovo*6
It's either a permutation even though I think I have tried them all - not all the words may be included or they all might be included.
I can work with that. I have a password checker built for partially known structures with wildcards. Note that if you have both wildcards and unknown order, the number of permutations can explode very quickly. I will stop after a few hundred thousand attempts so please be as specific as possible. Any detail you can recollect will help (although false recollections have been a problem in the past so don't strain your memory trying). Please PM me with details.