Where should you absolutely not go on a first date?
Lockdown had made dating harder.
Gigs, theatres and many of the normal first-date options were unavailable or restricted, meaning people had been forced to become more inventive.
That was not always a good thing.
One listener’s colleague had once been invited on a date to the rubbish tip.
Scott argued that the tip near him at least had the advantage of being close to Rickmansworth Aquadrome, meaning a determined romantic could turn household waste disposal into a surprisingly pleasant walk.
Another listener had unknowingly agreed to visit a furniture museum.
It did not sound promising, but six years later the couple were still together.
Perhaps the strangest success story came from a first date involving Yeovil high street which had eventually produced a marriage and children.
Fishing was either perfect or terrible date material
Michelle had been asked fishing.
Scott initially thought this was quite romantic: sit by the water, talk all day and see what happened.
The experience itself was apparently less cinematic.
Even so, the subject connected neatly with the day’s later Tap End story.
Don’t Look It Up went through the record collection
The quiz included a round on album titles.
As always, the simple-sounding questions became harder once phones were banned and the answer had to come from memory.
It remained one of the few lockdown habits Scott and Chris seemed keen to keep even as normal life gradually restarted.
Nathan Dawe went back to his resident-DJ years
Nathan Dawe took over the mix.
He began with the sort of record a resident DJ could rely on whenever a dancefloor needed rescuing.
Nathan said there were songs he had played three or four times a week during his club years because he knew they would bring people back.
He and Scott remembered the brutally hot clubs of Zante, where both had DJed.
One particularly vivid memory involved Reggie Yates ordering a platter of Greek cheese to the club as part of his rider.
In the heat, the cheese quickly became one of the least appealing backstage snacks imaginable.
White Noise, Rudimental and missing resort seasons
Nathan chose Disclosure and AlunaGeorge’s *White Noise*, still one of his favourite club records.
He was supposed to have spent the summer playing places such as Ibiza, Malia and Zante alongside UK festivals.
Almost all of it had disappeared.
Scott asked about the supposed rivalry between Nathan and Joel Corry, two former resident DJs now having major chart success at the same time.
Nathan ruined the hoped-for feud by revealing they got on extremely well and were due to meet for a pint.
Scott had wanted a new Oasis-style pop rivalry.
Instead he got two friends pleased to be succeeding together.
Nathan also chose Rudimental and talked about his own rise, with *Flowers* featuring Jaykae giving him another major hit.
Scott described Nathan as proof that years of graft, DJing and simply being decent to people could eventually pay off.
Tap End booked a real fisherman
Chris’s Golden Moment came from a period when he had time off and decided to fill the week with new experiences.
First on the list was learning to fish.
He found an instructor online named Alan.
The photographs showed exactly what Chris wanted: beard, fishing gear and enough large trout to suggest he was the real thing.
They agreed to meet early in the morning in a car park near Legoland.
Chris flashed the wrong man
Chris arrived before sunrise and sat in his car trying to work out how he would recognise Alan.
Several other vehicles were already there.
When one man arrived and remained inside his car, Chris convinced himself this must be the instructor waiting for a signal.
He flashed his headlights several times.
The man got out, collected fishing equipment and walked towards him.
For a moment everything appeared to have worked.
Then the stranger walked straight past Chris.
He was simply another fisherman.
Alan eventually knocked on Chris’s window.
Three hours in “the wild” went surprisingly well
The lesson itself was excellent.
Chris liked Alan immediately and admired his practical, outdoorsy competence.
They spent around three hours learning the basics at a lake near Legoland — a location Scott did not feel entirely justified Chris repeatedly describing as “the wild”.
A particularly good bacon sandwich afterwards made the morning even better.
Churchill’s War Rooms supplied a very different atmosphere
Chris then spent the afternoon visiting Churchill’s wartime Cabinet Rooms in London.
He loved the history and the strange feeling of walking through the small rooms where major parts of the Second World War had been coordinated.
During a talk in the Map Room, however, the guide’s face changed.
A smell moved through the cramped space.
Somebody had farted.
Chris became convinced the culprit was one of the German tourists in front of him and found the historical setting plus the completely childish smell impossible not to laugh at.
He ended the day delighted with both fishing and history.
The only planned adventure he did not complete that week was a skydive.
He bottled it — something he still regretted.
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