Remembering in what follows that the process works: some of the details might seem a bit bossy or a bit quaint, but given the job to be done it works. I imagine that it is rather more civilised than our own, vaguely comparable operation, in Croydon (see gmaps reference 51.376106, -0.097571).
One starts off by completing a form called DS-160 on the embassy web site, a form which contains, inter alia, some mandatory questions which one is hard put to answer, questions like 'where will you be staying?' and 'who will your contact in the US be?'. But one does the best one can and that seems to do.
Then, in gentle drizzle, I arrive at the embassy at around 1000 for a 1030 appointment to find two queues snaking their way towards a sort of fortified greenhouse guarding the entrance. Someone told me that people started to arrive around 0700 - at which time, on this particular day, it was raining quite hard. Embassy staff were supported by a number of our own policemen, looking rather bored but sporting large guns. I am directed to join one of the queues. After a while I am greeted by a young lady from the Consular Service who explains to me that cycling helmets are not permitted in the embassy and that mine will have to be deposited before I can proceed and I am directed up the road to the depositary.
Which, rather to my surprise, I find to be a chemist with whom the embassy have an arrangement for the safe keeping of forbidden items. After which I had been instructed to rejoin the back of the queue, but the chap with me knew better and said that we should proceed to the front of the queue, right outside the greenhouse. Which, I am glad to say, worked and we were soon being processed in the greenhouse. And which, I am not not so glad to say, in my case involved the partial removal of my braces which were setting off the bomb detectors, a slightly untidy business given my patented trouser attachments involving large key rings, not completed until after I had arrived in the indoor waiting room, diagrammed above.
A room rather like a hospital waiting room of the better sort or perhaps an airport lounge. Windows to the left, interview booths to the right, information screens ahead and refreshment facilities below the screens. The considerable space between the interview booths and the ceiling was protected with substantial steel bars. The refreshment facilities consisted of a battery of vending machines to the right plus a genuine person selling coffee and perhaps solid refreshments to the left, a person who did not appear to be doing much business, but it was decent of the embassy to make provision as I dare say that some people had traveled a long way and that others had had to wait quite a while. The information screens were big flat screens in an array about the size of a small cinema screen. Six panels to the left telling you where you were in the queue. Nine panels in the middle scrolling through the instructions, in the rather bossy prose of bureaucrats everywhere, but having the virtue of making sure that you understood what was going on and what you were supposed to do and not do. For example, there was a very firm instruction not to offer an officer any document without being expressly asked so to do. Three panels to the right appeared to be carrying day time TV, but I was too far away to be much bothered by it.
After a while called up for interview 1 which mainly consisted of handing in my documentation - particularly my passport and the receipt for my completed DS-160 - and getting my fingers photographed. Much less messy than the ink-pads used on Morse.
After a further while called up for interview 2 by a genuine Consular Officer from the US, who started off by scanning my fingers to make sure that they were the same as the ones photographed during the first interview. And in a few minutes I was out, to wait for an email telling me when my visa'd passport would be ready for collection at another depositary, this one in Chancery Lane. I wondered whether this depositary would turn out to be a greengrocer. I had not been asked for the photograph I read the internet instructions to mean that I needed and which I had entertainingly obtained from Mr. Broome of Epsom (see http://www.kennethbroomephotographers.com/).
A few days later the email turned up and I hoofed (it being a bit wet to cycle that leg of the journey) it over to Chancery Lane to find not a greengrocer but rather a courier operation which appeared to be mainly concerned with the transmission of legal documents for the many lawyers hanging about the area, many of whom seemed to have their own post boxes, with their post waiting for collection by their outdoor messengers.
My plastic wrapped passport was waiting for me in the 'T' pigeon hole and so I am now ready for the off.
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