You may have heard that ‘selfie’, the term used to describe the act of taking a photo of yourself, has become the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013.

Personally I was delighted that for once, and unlike all the other contenders for the title, I didn’t have to ask Google what it meant. Finally, I’m with it.

Or am I? The word may be new but people have been capturing images of themselves for years, centuries even, if you take into account that before photography we were dabbling at selfies in oils.

But, like never before, the digital technology we have to take and share images is now so instant that it has become part of everyday life for so many people.

Most teenagers are never to be seen without their camera phone welded to them – like the life support machine that they truly believe it to be.

And you can almost always spot someone in a crowd grinning inanely skywards as they stretch out their arm to take yet another vital shot – and without an ounce of self-consciousness. Selfie spotting is an entertaining sport in itself.

But if you are of a certain age you will remember when photos were precious. They only came in multiples of 12 and camera films were expensive to buy and to get developed.

And if you wanted the luxury of an indoor shot there was the additional expense of purchasing a flash cube.

With no ability to delete a bad shot every single click of the shutter counted and we had to wait days to get them back from the chemists.

You’d then often be bitterly disappointed to discover you’d given over a small fortune in exchange for a slim pack of out-of-focus shots with missing heads.

We did occasionally waste a few shots trying to clumsily aim the camera at ourselves, but as we can now take hundreds at a time for the mere cost of charging a battery, it’s no wonder we’re always at it.

And I have to put my hand up high and confess that when I was an internet dater a few years ago, I was always taking selfies to post online.

Particularly because I couldn’t possibly ever expect another living being on this planet to have the time, patience or spare lifespan to capture a photo of me that I actually like.

It’s definitely much easier to pose your butt off when you’re not only the model but the photographer and publisher too – with the ability to delete all the evidence.

However, a true selfie is not about hitting the delete button it seems. The latest craze my daughters indulge in is to take the most unflattering selfie they can muster up, which they then delight in posting to a site where friends can enjoy their humiliation for a few seconds before the photo self deletes – apparently.

Frankly there are more than enough bad photos of me floating around on the planet than want to risk adding to them.

So maybe I’ll never fully embrace the true spirit of the selfie – but to spare anyone else the trouble, as long as the delete button keeps working I’ll keep snapping.