On the basis that nothing is simple any more, I knew that renewing my passport was going to be a feat of mental and emotional endurance. However, I had not expected it to turn into an image consultation with the world’s most insulting women.
One of them, I hasten to point out, was a machine. A passport photo machine. Have you been in one of these recently? It is a breathtakingly rude piece of equipment. I remember sitting in a photo booth the last time I got a passport and having no more interaction with the strong arm of the state other than being told to adjust the stool up or down and press the button when I was ready. The photo popped out five minutes later, slightly sticky but apart from that — and the fact that I was wearing the startled rabbit expression traditional for passport pictures at that time — there was really nothing to complain about.
From the moment I entered the über-photobooth at the Identity and Passport Service (they don’t call it the Passport and Identity Service because that would make its acronym too accurate) I knew I was in trouble. The seat was not a swirly stool but a complicated-looking bench which I nearly dismantled in an attempt to bring it up to where a person of 5ft 3 might get her face in the frame.
This was when the second rudest woman in the world came in. She was dressed in a frightening grey uniform covered in epaulets and badges. ‘No, no, you don’t need to do that,’ she said, pulling back the curtain without so much as a by-your-leave. (Well, I might have been using the booth surreptitiously to tighten a bra strap for all she knew.) ‘The bench doesn’t move, the camera moves.’
‘Fine, thanks very much,’ I said, motioning at her to get out. I stared at the instructions, which referred to a control panel filled with different coloured buttons that looked so complex I half expected pushing one might launch me into outer space or set off a nuclear warning system.
It was so weird I didn’t get beyond putting the £5 coins in before the woman pulled the curtain back again. ‘Know what you’re doing?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Right, select your photo type here…’ and she pressed a lot of buttons, ‘and then adjust the camera like so…’ and she whizzed the lens up and down by manipulating various arrows, ‘and then…’
To be honest, I can’t remember what came next. When she left she said I was to push one last button, the big green one in the middle, and the process would begin. She was right. After ten minutes of fiddling, this photobooth was only just getting started. When I pressed green, it began talking to me in an impertinent female voice and showing an instruction film:
‘Do not let your hair fall on to your face,’ it said, as a furtive-looking woman with a terrifying bird’s nest of unruly tresses flashed up menacingly. I scrabbled around trying to tie my hair up and was reaching into my bag to get a scrunchy band when it barked:
‘Sit up in the seat!’, which nearly gave me a panic attack it was so like the nuns at my old school threatening to put a tennis racket down the back of my shirt.
‘Do not smile.’ Another chilling image was relayed showing an evil-looking character grinning.
‘If you must wear glasses you must stop them reflecting off the lens.’
Thank god my parents persuaded me to get contact lenses as a teenager, I thought, or I would be trying to work out how to make glass anti-reflective.
I half expected the next instruction to be: ‘Put some make-up on and get your highlights done, you scruffy cow.’ But it wasn’t. It was, ‘Look into the red light.’ Oh no, I thought, they’re going to hypnotise me as part of a new deportation strategy to get the immigration figures down. Tomorrow I’ll wake up on a rickety little bus taking me back up into the Abruzzo mountains whence my grandfather came.
Finally, the camera clicked and the resulting image popped up on the screen. As if by magic, the woman with the epaulets pulled back the curtain again.
‘Hmm,’ she said, with a voice that was pure Alison Steadman in Abigail’s Party. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, madam, that photo just doesn’t do you justice… I mean, don’t get me wrong, it will do the job, but it doesn’t do you any favours.’ And she started faffing about with the buttons again. ‘Now, if you select re-take…’
‘I just want a passport,’ I said weakly. But the machine was already ordering me to sit up in the seat.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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