Day Off in Charlton, UK

Dave's house is called Ferndale. There isn't a street address number, so what you write as an address when sending mail here is the name. Cool, and so typically British.

Ferndale is out in the English countryside. It's a lovely stone cottage.


The grounds are beautiful. Here are a few shots of the garden.




The resident pheasant:



The neighbor's sheep:






Next door neighbor is Roger. Across the lane are neighbors Bob & Tricia. Their home is called Lilac Cottage. It has an honest-to-god thatched roof. Don't see those too often. That's pretty much it - the next nearest neighbor is hundreds of yards away.


John made breakfast around 10. I had a single goose egg (HUGE!), scrambled, with beans and toast. Fab.

After that, a walk around the garden and a stroll to the neighbor's place, to feed dried pineapple chunks to the two enormous pigs. One if blind and the other one's deaf – what a pair they make. I was petting the larger one through the fence yesterday and found a sweet spot on his ear. I swear to you, within 60 seconds, he was laid out and fast asleep, snoring his ass off. Hilarious!

The neighbor's pigs:




Folks, this is my first ever posted video - be sure to watch it!

Did some birdwatching with John for a couple of hours, and then Dave took me on a drive up the tallest hill nearby. It's the highest point in the county of Dorset (911 feet above sea level, according to the plaque there), and as you see from the shots below, it's got a hell of a view.



John sometimes comes along on Dave's excursions to the top of the hill, but his ankle was bothering him today. Dave couldn't quite put his finger on it, but from this vantage point John can point our Guy Ritchie and Madonna's estate, just over in the next village.

Yes, that Madonna.

I guarantee you that you can't get close to it by car. I'd envision a bunch of guys dressed head-to-toe in black, roaming the grounds in black Range Rovers.

We sat at the peak on a bench for about 90 minutes, chatting. The breeze was cool and all you could hear was the wind blowing through the trees and the occasional small airplane flying by. Mostly talked about music stuff. Dave's currently working on two projects for Island Records. He's putting together a 2-CD deluxe version of Free's "Fire and Water" album, featuring some really cool outtakes and alternate mixes. He's also working on a box set of Paul Kossoff's stuff. Paul was the guitarist in Free – after the band broke up, he started a band called Back Street Crawler.

And we made plans to meet up in Baltimore in two weeks to see our friend Audley, who's playing with Peter Frampton this year.

Back to the house for lunch and more conversation with John.

Dave drove me back to the train station at 4:00 so I could catch the 4:42 train to London...