Summertime is when all the home construction that was planned all winter suddenly gets done. There is also the element of trying to get lots of exercise while sharpening up one's skills as a carpenter, plumber and electrician. In this environment history hardly gets a look in, but that does not mean that things are not rumbling on. Son, Dominic and I have already co-authored a paper on the legal instruments by which the UK Government managed to control telegraphs even before they had effectively come into common use. By contrast, they were very slow to respond when mobile phones and the internet took off. Anyway, I have been nagging Dominic for some time to look into the House of Lords case between Western Union and the Anglo American Telegraph Co. It was concerned with an interpretation of taxation law and as he is a tax lawyer, I am sure that he is best placed to clarify this. He informs me that so far as the law is concerned it was relatively straightforward, even if some of the judgements were somewhat unusual. So, it looks as if any paper will be an historical one with a legal perspective rather than the other way round.

I am still gathering comments about the content of my history of meteorology. Although it addresses many important issues and links information from different disciplines, I am not sure if I have the energy to haul it around conventional publishers and am considering on-line publication via Lulu.

Many people may not be aware that the 1911 census fore Ireland is available on-line. At first sight this might appear unusual as the normal practice in the UK is not to publish this information until 100 years have elapsed. Ireland was part of the UK in 1911, so why this alteration of convention? I do not know what the official view is, but public records in Ireland are in short-supply, many having been destroyed in the fire which engulfed the Four Courts building during the Civil War of 1922. Access to census data has been a boon for those starved of other sources of information. Initially, only a few areas were available. These included Dublin and Co. Kerry, where the telegraph cable stations were located. We were surprised that none of the names of cable staff that we might have expected to see (Graves, Hearnden, Mackey) were there and we thought that perhaps they had been elsewhere in Ireland on Census Day 1911. Well, data for the whole of Ireland is now available and there are no cable staff or their dependents. I suppose a search of UK records in two years time, might give us some indication, but maybe there were other reasons of which I am not aware. Does anyone have any ideas? Incidentally, it is reported that 1901 census data for Ireland should be available before the end of this year. We will be continuing our hunt