how about using the eeprom inside the pic?
I'm going to be suing the 16F88 pic it has 256 bytes of eeprom and 20000 hours counted once a second only comes to 33 bytes if I'm starting to understand this right?

What I'd need is some way of telling the pic to start counting once a second but when told it stops counting and puts the result into eeprom, THEN when it's told to start counting again it reads the value from eeprom, displays it on the lcd for a few minutes and then carries on couting FROM that count.

Does this seem possible? I know to most experienced people here it's probably old stuff but to me it's new