THERE are some things I hate more than having my photograph taken. Root canal work, for example.

My resident David Bailey spends several hours composing an image, then says: "Come on... SMILE!" By which time my jaw is aching, I'm plotting mutiny, and wondering how much younger I would have looked if he'd snapped me straight away.

But despite all the discomfort of sitting, it's the actual processing that I've always found to be the worst bit. Because every time a film gets sent off to the developers, there's a fleeting moment of hope that maybe, just maybe, one of these pictures might not embarrass or depress me.

Then reality returns in a bright plastic envelope, which opens to reveal not the half-decent shot of my dreams, but the holiday snaps of a gurning simpleton who blinks as the shutter closes.

I'd like to think the lab got the films mixed up, but the loon in the pictures seems only too familiar.

"Well, that one looks OK to me," says a doubtful friend, surveying a shot that shows, mainly, the back of my head.

Our new digital camera has been a quantum leap for household calm, because at least we get to choose the pictures we want to keep. And who knows, one day, there might just be one worth hanging on to.

So, a digital camera is, I concede, a good thing. But now there's another invention on the way - a device that fills my heart with horror. It won't be on the market for several years, but a Salford University graduate called Lyndsay Williams has come up with a gizmo that is, in effect, a personal black box.

The SenseCam, as it is called, can apparently record every last detail of your entire life, storing up to 2,000 images of people and places at a time, which you can then download on to a computer and use to provide endless entertainment for all your friends and family.

Every significant moment can be captured for posterity. No longer need the Uncle Cyrils of this world bore you with tales of when they were lads. Now, they can actually show you what happened, in the sort of terrifying detail that makes the EastEnders omnibus seem like a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

You can chart your own advancing decrepitude and hand it over to a plastic surgeon so he or she can see how your face used to work before your features started to develop what some people call character.

You could have SenseCam auctions on eBay. Would you have to pay more for access to Kylie's dull Thursday afternoon last March than for, say, Britney's latest visit to the nail bar? Who can tell.

I think one of the things that puts me off the SenseCam is the fact that it dwells so much on the individual. Plenty of us - myself included - do not need the extra encouragement to navel-gaze.

I'm not totally against technology and its ability to define the uniqueness of us all, though. I'm impressed, for example, by DNA advances in the fight against crime.

Nevertheless, it made me smile when I read how a good old-fashioned tea tray helped DNA science bring a thief to justice in Dorset.

The tray was lying handy for a 75-year-old pensioner, Joan Rice, when a luckless career burglar picked her house to do over. She grabbed her tray and hit him over the head six times, so hard that she drew blood. Scientists and DNA did the rest, and the burglar got four years.

Now, a SenseCam might have taken a fine snap of the drama, but unless Mrs Rice had used it to batter her burglar, I doubt it would have given as conclu-sive a proof of his identity.

Sometimes, the old ways are the best.

Updated: 11:24 Wednesday, May 12, 2004