O photo booth, where art thou?

[caddyman]

I decided that it would be a fine idea to use my as yet unspent winnings (well, mainly unspent) from the quiz just over a week ago on renewing my passport. I let in lapse in 2006 as I didn’t see myself needing one ion the near future and I still don’t really, but the option of a sneak attack on the continent would be nice.

I filled out the form online and the passport office kindly sent me the official version filled out as far as possible some time ago and I filed it as pending. Now I have decided to renew it, I need photographs of my unsmiling physog.

You remember those automated passport photo booths? Of course you do. The ones that were always filled to the brim with screaming school kids trying to get a group photograph from a booth designed for one. The things where they ended up with eight pairs of eyes falling off the bottom of the picture and the tall girl at the back with the top of her head chopped off by the top of the frame. Usually there would be a balloon, too.

There was a time when you could barely walk down the high street without tripping over those machines. There would be one in any vaguely sheltered corner, at least one in every train station, at the taxi rank and in every pharmacy and sometimes in the chip shop, too; next to the one-armed bandit. Well I spent a goodly part of Saturday trudging around the West End trying vainly to find one (though it occurred to me after the event that I had walked past a couple of prime sites without investigating). This morning I found one at Victoria station (the one I used in 1996 to take the picture for that passport and in which I looked like a world weary detective who had lost an important case at the High Court).

It was broken.

I am told there is another one on the station, right down the back, in the dark bit by the Brighton platforms. I might try that on my way home. Or I may just never leave the country again and spend the money on buns instead.

Comments

[mr-h-r-hughes.livejournal.com]

Maybe they just don't survive long in London - they aren't that hard to find in my experience ?

[mathcathy]

Inside chemists and supermarkets is where you'll find them now.
Did you try that?

[romney.livejournal.com]

Woolworths. Oh, wait...

[oldnick.livejournal.com]

When I renewed my passport earlier this year, I found them at Sainsbury and Tesco.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

There's one in Euston Station in the corridor to the right at the front as you're looking at the departure boards.

When I got mine done, I went to one of the photographic shops at the north end of Tottenham Court Road. They're the same price as the machines,and if the photos get messed up, you're dealing with a human being who can retake them there and then. They also tend to be up on the regulations for the photos - when I got some done by the machine in Euston Station, they wouldn't have been accepted by the Passport Office as my head took up too little of the photo.

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

What excellent, resourceful friends you have, Bry.

[fencingsculptor.livejournal.com]

You remember those automated passport photo booths?

Of course I do they were central to the plot of 'Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain'.


If you find one with Audrey Tautou in dressed as Zorro inside it, please let me know IMEDIATELY !


...otherwise i was helpfully going to suggest a Post Office....but hekai beat me to it...

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

...and romney, too!

[romney.livejournal.com]

With you well-entrenched in North London and myself buried in my Sarf-Lund'n landfill, we seem to have these days adopted the policy of our respective jackets.

[ladkyis.livejournal.com]

Boots the chemist usually has one