Is it wrong to insist someone retake your photo when you’ve seen the results on your phone and you look terrible?

Charlotte, by email

I have been thinking about this a lot of late, Charlotte, for two very specific reasons. The first was Joe Stone’s adorable piece in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine on Saturday about being a Spice Girls superfan. In it, Stone describes meeting his heroes individually. His encounter with Victoria Beckham is just the most brilliant encapsulation of what it is like to deal with someone who has perhaps been too famous for too long. She says things such as: “[Fig is] obviously a smell a lot of people associate with me,” because she genuinely thinks that she is at the forefront of people’s minds all the time and when they catch a scent of fruit on the breeze their immediate reaction is: “Oh! Victoria Beckham!”

But the best bit came at the end of their meeting, when Stone asked for a photo, to which Beckham readily agreed, but “lost all composure when she saw the result”. She insisted the two of them go to a different room “with better lighting” where she proceeded to take not one, not two but three more photos, until at last there was one that she deemed acceptable. Can we all take a moment to remember that this was just a photo for Stone on his phone and not, say, an Annie Leibovitz shoot in Vogue?

Now, it’s easy to laugh at Beckham about this. Let’s all do it now and get it out of our systems, OK? Hahahahahaha. There, done. But let’s all take a moment to look at – camera zooms out and turns on the audience – OURSELVES.

A few weeks ago I was on a work trip in California and driving from Palm Springs to Los Angeles. Next to the highway I spotted a giant sign – so giant, in fact, it was impossible to not spot it – reading “HADLEY”. Obviously, my first thoughts were: “How sweet! I wonder how the denizens of California knew I was coming to town? Perhaps they smelled some Febreze. Because, after all, that is the smell a lot of people associate with me.” Following some impressive investigative journalism on this deep-throat secret website called “Google”, I acertained that the sign was not, amazingly, for me, but was advertising a health-food store called Hadley Fruit Orchards, which has been going since 1931. Naturally, I pulled off the highway at once.

Hadley and her sign. Photograph: Hadley Freeman

Now, all of you Michaels and Emilys and Annabels out there won’t understand any of this. “You interrupted your drive because you saw a store with your name on it? Are you four?!” you’ll cry as one. But for those of us who NEVER see our name in any context other than in relation to ourselves (and, perhaps, Spandau Ballet) it is unspeakably thrilling to spot it somewhere else. (It also helps if you have the narcissistic mentality of a four-year-old.) I have a similar sensation when I see another parent of twins in the playground – that sense of, “Ah, there you are, fellow person who knows what it’s like going through life with this ridiculous name / two toddlers simultaneously all day every day. Only we truly understand one another.”

Anyway, I pulled in and, obviously, did what you have to do nowadays to prove anything happened and had someone take a photo of me with the (my) sign. But here’s the kicker: I looked terrible. I was wearing my worst jeans and my worst T-shirt, because I thought I would just be driving that day and I was sacrificing my ugliest clothes to the gods of inevitable driving sweat. I was not expecting that the most momentous experience of my life would be recorded for posterity that day. And when I looked at the preview of the photo on my phone, I knew I would regret this mistake for ever. But because I like to think I am not that kind of woman, the tragic, vain person who would make someone take a picture of them four times, no, I’m the casual cool feminist who is above such shallow things, I ignored the voice in my head that was screaming: “Tell this person who took your photo to wait 15 minutes so you can get your suitcase out of the trunk, find some decent clothes, run into the toilet in Hadley Fruit Orchards, change and then take your photo again!” Instead, I said “Thank you,” with a forced grin, closed my eyes and posted the picture, because I decided finding a store called Hadley outweighed in importance me looking like a total munter. And my friends agreed, bless them, which is why they’re my friends (and most of them have seen me looking a lot worse than simply wearing a pair of bad jeans). But I admit that, because of that picture, the pleasure of thinking about Hadley Fruit Orchard is, ever so slightly, mitigated.

So what I’m saying is, I totally understand where Victoria Beckham was coming from. We all do, which is why the temptation to mock her is so great: we’re trying to pretend we’re different when we know, really, that we’re exactly the same, because wanting to look good is a normal human feeling. It’s just that some of us are more hypocritical about it.

This is why I think, ultimately, that digital photography and being able to see your photos before they’re printed out is a nefarious development: it turns us all into narcissists or hypocrites. Both are terrible looks, and – tragically for mankind – there is no solution.