WATCHING an advert recently, I genuinely believed the subject matter to be genuine. “Are you suffering from TSD?” a holidaymaker asked, before going on to describe the symptoms of Travel Selfie Disorder.

This refers to the obsession people have with taking ‘selfies’ – photographing themselves with their mobile phone. To me, this seems a strange phenomenon. In days gone by, people took photographs of places and events and stood by for others to capture them against these backdrops, but they would not have considered photographing themselves close-up. If, rarely, they did attempt to snap the occasional self-portrait – by setting the camera on a hard surface and running in front of it – it was just a bit of fun, and the results were usually rubbish.

Now people preen and pose before taking not just one or two, but hundreds, sometimes thousands, of shots of themselves – which they then proceed to send to dozens of other people. Hasn’t anyone ever heard of the word ‘narcissist’? Surely that is what it amounts to?

I could understand it to some extent if you’re a teenage fan of One Direction and bump into them in the street, but for selfie takers the occasion doesn’t have to be up to much. They don’t have to be meeting an A-list celebrity or standing at the top of Mount Everest to capture images of themselves. People do it all the time – on the bus, at the supermarket checkout, as they brush their teeth before bed. On holiday recently, my 16-year-old daughter had such a bad dose of TSD I was thinking of having her hospitalised. She snapped a selfie every couple of seconds, often including her older sister in the shot.

I’m sick of hearing the word ‘selfie’ – ‘Kirsty and Phil’s first selfie’, ‘Rory McIlroy takes a selfie with his team’.. ‘Santi Cazorla and Nacho Monreal’ (Arsenal FC) celebrate with a selfie’.the media is obsessed with them.

Last weekend I was very disheartened to learn that my 76-year-old verging-on-Luddite father has discovered the selfie. My daughter showed him how to take one and he was away, posing and pouting like Paris Hilton. He dragged the whole family into his shots, taking them over and over again to make sure everyone was sporting their best smile.

“Oh, that one is great, it makes me look so young,” he said, after my daughter taught him to doctor an image. I felt such despair when I learned about this.

I have never taken a selfie and don’t intend to. I’m what people call camera shy (another expression that appears to have no application in modern society). I don’t like it when other people take my picture, so I’m hardly going to be driven to snap dozens of pictures of myself.

Worse still is ‘photobombing’ – putting yourself into the frame of someone else’s photograph. What would motivate anyone to do such a thing? I just hope that I never open a newspaper and see my dad photobombing. That will be the day I lose the will to live.