Lockdown Eve had turned the roads into Christmas Eve
Scott and Chris left Radio 1 the previous afternoon with plenty of time.
They had an interview booked from home for 6pm.
Chris normally needed around 40 minutes to drive back.
He therefore had roughly two and a half hours.
There was no reason to worry.
Then the traffic stopped.
Chris tried different sat-nav apps, watching the roads around him turn red.
Eventually he reached a stretch where cars travelling in opposite directions had effectively locked one another in place.
For hours, almost nothing moved.
Other listeners reported the same thing as people made last-minute journeys before the new lockdown began.
The roads felt like Christmas Eve.
The journey became a survival exercise
Chris had left work expecting to be home quickly.
He had not packed food.
He had not planned for a long stop.
As darkness arrived, he began searching around the car for anything useful.
There was chewing gum.
There may have been old chips down the side of the seat, although even Chris was not desperate enough to make those his dinner.
The more serious problem was the toilet.
He had needed to go slightly when he left Radio 1.
Several hours later, “slightly” was no longer the right word.
The personalised Love Island bottle became the only option
Chris looked around the car.
There was nowhere private outside.
Other drivers were standing beside their vehicles.
People could see into the car.
Then he noticed a water bottle.
Not just any water bottle.
A personalised Love Island bottle with Chris’s name on it.
There was still a little water inside.
He drank it.
Then the idea he had initially treated as a joke became a genuine plan.
He was going to have to wee into the bottle.
It was much harder than the survival programmes suggest
The problem with doing this while sitting in a driver’s seat is geometry.
Chris had to remain low enough that people outside could not see what he was doing while somehow positioning the bottle around the seat and steering wheel.
He compared it with an episode of *The Cube*.
Complete the task.
Do not spill anything.
Do not get caught.
Then another problem arrived.
The bottle was filling up.
Chris was judging the remaining capacity largely by sound.
He had to stop at exactly the right moment.
And then people recognised him
Just as Chris had successfully completed the emergency manoeuvre, three people walked past.
One looked into the car and recognised that the man inside was famous from somewhere.
Unfortunately, they could not immediately remember his name.
Chris was sitting there with his belt undone and a completely full personalised Love Island bottle beside him while somebody peered through the window trying to work out who he was.
Eventually the passer-by offered:
Charlie XCX?
Chris decided that was close enough.
He had more urgent issues.
Forty minutes had become nine hours
Scott had continued receiving updates late into the night.
11pm.
Midnight.
1am.
By the time Chris finally got home, a journey which normally took roughly 40 minutes had taken around nine hours.
The story was ridiculous.
It was also a very specific final image of the day before lockdown: endless traffic, no open facilities and a radio presenter using a souvenir reality-TV bottle as emergency equipment.
Granny Tinder widened the radius
The dating feature also returned.
Zofia’s grandmother judged a fresh set of profiles after the team widened the search radius.
Mikey, a 25-year-old taxi driver, was dismissed despite offering big nights out and lazy days in.
A 47-year-old called Brian was immediately considered too old for 24-year-old Zofia.
A 23-year-old chef promising he could “cook up a storm in the kitchen and in the bedroom” also failed to win Granny over.
The distance might have increased.
The standards had not.
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