>Martin,
>I have seen this used before in a few apps I maintain, but I didn't know it was an actual pattern - I thought it was the developer doing something quirky and never looked at it again. I will check it out, but it sounds about right.

Indeed, you can read a description here (from another Martin):
http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/lazyLoad.html

And if you really want to get a book on these matters, in fact Fowler's "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" is quite good one (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321127420) and it actually have some C# code (the samples are half Java and half C#).

Regards,