The Bellrock lunch buffet, £15 weekdays.

“3 courses including Soup, Pizzas, Haddock, Spicy Fish, White pudding, King Rib, Chefs dish of the day. Hot desserts with Custard, Cold desserts i.e trifle and cakes, Cold Meats, Pasta, Salad, Whippy Ice cream.”

https://www.thebellrock.co.uk/lunch-buffet

I think OP is referring to this https://www.thebellrock.co.uk/lunch-buffet which does appear to be a fish-n-chip buffet of sorts (amongst other things) which has been in various tabloid newspapers in the last month or so.

There was a brief moment around the turn of the millennium where that was what some of us were expecting. I was in college just after that and there were some free Internet kiosks, which combined with the ubiquitous free-to-use computer labs on campus, did a pretty good job of making this type of lifestyle possible, to the extent you could store your important documents online (much harder though in a pre-Dropbox, pre-Google Docs world!). Or another thing that was a big trend then was Portable Apps. On a flash drive on your keychain, you'd have installs of apps that you needed, together with their data and whatever documents you might need.

“They have phones in booths now? Finally! I don’t have to lug this cell phone around.”

Hermes Conrad, Futurama Season 6, Episode 6: Lethal Inspection

For a moment they put phones that had the ability to do text messages in them (but still looked very ordinary), which feels a little retro futuristic.

Looked better than the weird ad screen monstrosities you get now with a token phone on them.

a parallel universe where all those kiosks still existed, and they were somehow like computer that you can briefly rent, to do the things people do with a smartphone

In the early days of the Internet, this existed somewhere in western Europe where I was traveling.

There was a phone booth down the block from my hotel and a couple of times I popped in and used it to check my email.

Maybe Vienna or Amsterdam? It was a long time ago. Swiping one's own credit card would have been unusual then, so I have no idea how I paid for it. Especially since I mostly used travelers checks.

In some Asian countries electric scooters with swappable battery packs are very common, and they have roadside battery swap stations where (for a subscription fee?) you can take a freshly charged battery and leave your old one. Seems like a great idea.

> QR codes on stickers/ads in public spaces are a sort of bridge between the physical and digital worlds

They are already like that for at least a decade. The last time I visited London the phone booths all had ads for escort services pasted inside.

> - Not sure what they're called, but I've seen a lot of fully automated outdoor "locker stations" for packet deliveries

Drop boxes!

I was part of a team prototyping these some 20 years ago. I highly doubt we were the only team doing so, but we were certainly unaware of any commercially available/deployed stations at the time. I was writing the software, in particular the orchestration of the locks and event bus for the transmissions.

Lots of fun from trying to fathom how undocumented solenoids operated, to trips to various countries for remote and environmental testing, and destructive tests simulating someone driving a truck into an installation (i.e., by deliberately driving a truck into one!)

The nerdiest moment was taking a mainboard model that we were getting intermittent faults with and recreating the exact environmental conditions to recreate the problem. This involved incubating the mainboard in a sealed environment chamber to control temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure. The fault was bit-flipping because electrons were jumping rails when the microchip(s) were cold and damp.

   - a tree that grows money
   - harmony between worlds

Wilkinson's is no longer there. Replaced by an arcade style venue called Urban Fun, I think.

Many Kingstoners probably think of themselves as being in London. There's some graffiti on the way in to London on the A3 that says "Surrey not Surrey".

Ah yes, that would be what I was thinking of; I think I saw one somewhere in Manchester as a kid.

Love it!

Those are the urban ones. The ones in the countryside were useful sometimes if you were trying to get a taxi or a lift. They often had plants growing in them.