Tweak to support calling the pager out of context

I'm not sure this is the right approach, but ...
I want to add a pager embedded in a node view, well, in a block above it anyway.
So that when viewing an individual item [/node/77], you can also go up to the index of all such items, adding the view as a context.
--------------------------
A B C ...
--------------------------
[Single node title]
Full node view
....
--------------------------

I've found how to retrieve the pager display for this view, (rough code below) and embedded it in the page, but the URLs it produce are linked back to the current page (/node/77?apage=B) etc which doesn't really work.

I found the point that this appears to be changeable (cool!)

function theme_alpha_pager($items, $current = '', $path = '', $query = '') {
...

so in views_alpha_pager_views_query_alter() I went:
From

  $view->alpha_pager_output = theme('alpha_pager', $items, $apage);

To

  $view->alpha_pager_output = theme('alpha_pager', $items, $apage, $view->url);

Is this correct? It works, but I'm not sure if there may have been a reason to have NOT passed it through in the first place. Will it break other stuff, or was it just left out?

My current block code, for reference is

$view = views_get_view('advertisers_index');
// Initialize the view - this prepares the pager for display
$args = array(); // the letter goes here?
$output = views_build_view('page',$view,$args);

// should find an easier way 
// - this is creating the entire view when all we want is the pager

print $view->alpha_pager_output;

Still under development...

In the long run, what would anyone suggest be the minimal code required to get this effect? I'm tracing the code through OK, but I'm not sure how much I can short-circuit the process. I'm hoping the caching means it's not really a problem.