How to restore Address Book and then add working iCloud Account?

OK i'm going insane trying to resolve this one.... all started with a shed load of Duplicates! 😕

3 devices: MacBook Pro, iMac, iPhone 4S

I finally upgraded the MBP to 10.7.2, the iMac already was and the iPhone was already 5.0.1

I've held off moving to iCloud from Mobile.me because of the 10.6.x MBP

...so now all on the same song sheet, I clicked the upgrade to iCloud from my MBA and all went well! 🙂

The MBA pushed 1352 address cards to the iCloud and I only had the iCloud account showing in my Address Book.

My iPhone then happily went iCloud and downloaded ALL the calendars (and I have far too many....I'll clean up soon, promise ;-)

but i hadnt turned on Contact sync for a very good reason.

I DON'T WANT ALL MY CONTACTS ON MY iPHONE!

So having found some advice, it says you have to keep everything you dont want in iCloud, in the On My Mac account

(which I didnt appear to have at that point)

I turned my iMac on and connected to the iCloud, all went well and I again had a single iCloud account in Address Book with 1352 cards 🙂

I then went Address Book/Preferences/General/Deafult Account/On My Mac and it generated the empty On My Mac account in the Address Book.

Highlighting ALL my iCloud address cards and dragging them to On My Mac, a successful duplication was made.

Highlighting ALL my iCloud address cards and deleting, all three devices now had NO contacts in the iCloud related accounts (what I wanted)

I then turned on Contact sync on my iPhone and it pushed 186 contacts to the iCloud and in turn to all 3 devices (perfect!)

but then came the fun part....

On my iMac, the On My Mac account had gone from 1352 to over 1900 with loads of duplicates. So I selected ALL deleted and restored from an Address Book backup prior to going iCloud. This began my problem....

if I restore it WIPES the iCloud account from the machine and leaves me with 1352 in On My Mac,

if I try and add an iCloud account it then wants to upload the 1352 into the iCloud which I dont want.

If I delete all, setup iCloud acount first I get the 186 correctly, but the moment I restore from backup it overwrites and I'm again left with On My Mac and no iCloud account

AHHHHHH!

how on earth do I get the working iCloud with 186 (which is perfectly fine on 3 devices) and restore 1352 in ON MY MAC, so my iMac Address Book has two accounts very seperate from each other. I want the 186 on my MacBook Pro and iPhone, but I want an iCloud account with 186 and an On My Mac with 1352 on the iMac 🙂

ANY advice welcome

TIA