WHY does anyone feel the need to take a selfie in a cinema? You might as well take one by the frozen peas in the supermarket, or by the timetable at a bus stop.

Some selfies capture the excitement of a big show or a gig before the curtain rises - but sitting in your local multiplex shouldn’t even be interesting to you, let alone anyone else.

I was at the cinema last week, the film had just started when two women arrived a couple of rows in front. Not content with being late, obstructing the screen while they shuffled in, they set about taking selfies, sending camera flashes into the darkness. Then they fiddled about on their phones, creating irritating pools of light, with not a flicker of thought for anyone around them.

Now cinema tickets aren’t cheap. When I’ve paid the best part of a tenner to sit down and watch a film, I’m quiet and respectful of others, and I expect everyone else to be the same. Unfortunately, they’re not. The man sitting next to me (why are they always next to me?) checked his ‘phone throughout the film. The selfie queens got up and went out, then came back in again, balancing trays of nachos on buckets of pop.

It didn’t escape my notice that the children in the cinema were better behaved than the adults. If only Mary Poppins herself had poked her head out of the screen and snapped her fingers to make the grown-ups and their wretched mobiles disappear...

I’m tired of selfies. They’ve been around for ages, and people are still obsessed with them. My friend, a college tutor, despairs of her students, constantly posing for them. “It’s an addiction,” she said. I once saw a man take a lone selfie in a convenience store. It was tragic. A Facebook friend recently posted a rather unflattering close-up on a train to Leeds. The glamour...

But are these tedious selfies, in cinemas, trains and shops, much different to the daredevil selfies that cost people their lives? It’s all narcissism. Nothing says “me, me, me” like a selfie, and pushing the boundaries, whether hanging from the top of a skyscraper or dangling over a lion pit, means even more ‘likes’ and jaw-drop emojis. And that’s what counts, right?

In the end it probably didn’t count for the two men posing for selfies as they pulled the pin from a hand grenade. Or the woman grinning into her phone, hanging from a 40ft bridge, before falling onto a busy highway. Or the man who accidentally shot himself in the neck taking a gun selfie. Or the visitors to a Texas nature park regularly gored by bison who don’t quite get the concept of waiting patiently until the selfie stick’s in the right position.

Late last year Chinese climber Wu Yongning scaled a skyscraper with no safety equipment and filmed himself hanging off the roof by his fingertips. Perhaps inevitably, the 26-year-old fell more than 60 floors to his death, and a clip of his final moments went viral, raising questions about the role of the “cash for clips” industry in such tragedies.

His high-rise selfies had amassed a social media fanbase, with around a million followers presumably waiting for him to put a foot wrong.

If people want to take extreme selfies, for money or affirmation from strangers online, it’s up to them. I just feel for the emergency services who have to clear up the mess, the motorists wondering what that thing is hurtling towards them from the high-rise bridge, the train driver forever plagued by the railway line selfie that didn’t go to plan, and the parents of a young man with his life ahead of him, who chose to gamble with it, posing with his phone dangling from a sky-scraper rooftop.

* The humble sausage roll doing its bit for Veganuary

GREGGS' new vegan sausage rolls caused a stir in our office, with several colleagues (all meat-eaters) giving them a thumbs-up. By the time I went to buy one, they'd sold out!

It's high time the bakery chain catered for the UK's 3.5 million vegans. Greggs said the launch followed "strong consumer demand", including a Peta petition signed by over 20,000 people.

With rising demand for vegetarian and vegan products - recent research from Waitrose found a third of people now have meat-free or meat-reduced diets - there's more choice than ever.

It's a far cry from when I turned veggie, 30 years ago. Back then it was either dehydrated soya mince or a weird sausage mix you had to add water to, then roll out yourself. But I persevered, and haven't eaten meat since.

* Time's up for this gushing false modesty

GOOD to see so many Brit wins at this week's Golden Globes Awards - the most in a decade - but I do wish Olivia Colman wouldn't gush like a giddy schoolgirl whenever she makes an acceptance speech. It makes her look a bit of a drip.

She's a talented actress and I'm sure she's marvellous in The Favourite, the role which earned her a best actress award at the Globes. But her "Gosh, little old me" false modesty is tiresome, particularly in an age when women are fighting to be taken more seriously in the film industry.