What is it?
This is what's left of Jonathan Palfrey's personal Web site, first established in 1996.
In those days, your own Web site was about the only way to express yourself on the Web. But now I interact with friends on Facebook, display my photos on Flickr and Instagram, write book reviews on Goodreads, and write occasional blog posts. So this site is on the back burner, and serves as a home for mostly old stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else. I make minor updates here occasionally.
If you want to know who I am or how to contact me, click here.
If you want to know what Thurb means, or why this is thurb.com, click here.
What's relatively new here
| Monthly: | Update my log of local temperatures. |
| Sep 2024: | Update my page about the characters in To Turn the Tide. |
| Aug 2024: | Update the Palfrey Awards for novels/novellas and my list of favourite short stories and novelettes. |
| Dec 2023: | Update my Terry Pratchett page. |
| Jan 2023: | Update my Doctor Who actors timeline page. |
| Feb 2022: | Add a new page listing books that I read in 1963. |
| Jul 2020: | This site is rehoused in Norway by Runbox. It was previously housed in the USA by Web.com, which terminated it suddenly without explanation. |
| Mar 2020: | Add a new page listing Lord of the Rings actors in order of age. |
| Sep 2019: | Add a new page of historical turning points. |
My photos on Flickr
Having lived in 12 countries and visited 16 others, I have a large collection of travel and personal photos, and I'm gradually uploading a small selection of them to Flickr. Here are links to an overview of the photos by category and the latest photos I've uploaded.
Favourites
Here are my favourite Web sites, quotations, novels/novellas, and short stories/novelettes.
Games
I've always liked playing games of skill, but I don't know anyone around here who wants to play them. Currently I play chess against the Shredder chess program, and Railway Rivals against human opponents by e-mail. You can find here complete rules for the Advanced Battleships pencil-and-paper game, incomplete rules for Zola Bola (a sport), my thoughts on unreal-time games, and Frank Hunter's American Civil War game (1996).
Family corner
This currently contains a record of my sister's acting career and my mother's biography of the ballet dancer John Gilpin.
School corner
A long time ago, I attended two boarding schools in England while my parents were in Africa: Stouts Hill in Gloucestershire, then Blundell's in Devon. Blundell's has its own Web site, but Stouts Hill closed down as a school in 1979, so I've dedicated some pages to its memory here. These are intended for other veterans of the school and aren't of general interest.
Miscellaneous
I've written a bunch of book and film reviews, a Lord Darcy timeline, and accounts of a cruise in the Caribbean, my holiday in the Seychelles, and two weeks in Bavaria. If you want any more, here are my thoughts on politics, religion, the Swatch beat, a sensible calendar, space travel times, and books that I read in 1963.