A true story…
A friend and I had arrived at Liverpool Street way too early so we headed for the station’s cafe to ordered some tea and toast. After breakfast, we found we still had some more time to kill before going our separate ways, so with loose change to hand, we made tracks towards the station’s photo booth.
In went the cash, and almost immediately, the silly posing began, followed by the obligatory face-pulling, kissing and general prating about until the machine stopped flashing at us. Once outside, we heard the whirring and clicking as the processing began and, sometime later, out flopped our photographs.
I pulled them out of the tray, but didn’t look at them right away as they were still tacky, so I began waving them about to dry them off. I turned them over to see there was a dramatic blemish in all four photos.
With the back of the prints towards Judie’s face, I said with a deadpan look, “Spot the problem,” and flipped them over? With in seconds of focusing on them, she collapsed into a heap of giggles, closely followed by me. Despite spending the vast sum of £1.50, the machine had only taken shots of one person and it wasn’t either of us!
We composed ourselves and took another look at the snaps. It was no good, our giggle buttons had been fully pushed, and it didn’t help when I said our mystery man looked like a serial flasher. He had a potato-shaped head and his glasses would’ve have made an ideal set of spares for the Hubble telescope! They were like coke bottle ends and were set in a pair of thick dark frames.
He also wore a scruffy black jacket, a bright green shirt, and around his neck was a brown tie. Judie and I were well into two solid minutes of laughter, and character assassination, when suddenly she looked over my shoulder and then fell silent. Her jaw dropped wide open and she had a vacant look on her face.
While I was still chuckling I heard a squeaky voice say behind me, “Excuse me have you seen my photos?” When I spun round, the bloke we’d just been barracking was standing in front of us! It was a tad embarrassing I have to say, and I still had the photo sheet in my hand. He must have heard us giggling like a pair of school kids beforehand so, acting like one; I shoved the sheet in my bag!
While we were both still cackling, we had to listen to a long drawn- out saga of how two days prior he’d used the photo booth, but nothing came out. I never did discover how Judie stopped herself from completely.
Me? I adopted the, biting the inside of my mouth approach, and as much clenching as my facial muscles would allow, before cramp set in. How I didn’t hit the deck slapping the tarmac, begging him to stop talking, I don’t know and, when I realised he was wearing the same clothes as in the picture, I had to walk away…
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