I haven't read any of Doris Lessing's books but I will now. Not because she has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but because of how she received the news. I don't know how many of you saw the moment she was told — by Sky News. Surely, you would have thought, an organisation that has given prizes to the finest scientific minds that the human race has produced might have been able to find a means of communicating the fact of winning to the winner — telephone? telegram? carrier pigeon? — but here, for those of you who didn't, is the basic dialogue that ensued.

Man with mike: Ms Lessing? Ms Lessing? You've won the Nobel prize!

Doris: (Getting out of cab with shopping) What?

Man with mike: The Nobel Prize for Literature.

Doris: (Deep sigh, looks at pavement) Oh Christ...

Oh Christ. How fabulous is that? I heartily recommend going to watch the extended footage on YouTube, because there are a number of bonuses, including the sight of a male companion of Doris — possibly her son, I'm hoping her lover — who appears to have his arm in a sling made out of an artichoke (I promise you, I'm not making this up); and, more importantly, Doris's further thoughts on this great honour, which involve asking the various journalists what they think she should say in response, and a brilliant, almost Catherine Tate bit of irritable-old-lady arrogance when she makes it clear that the reason she's not that bothered is because she has already “won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one”. What I particularly like about that bit is that she hasn't — she has never won the Booker, despite being nominated three times: but the slippage of this fact seems to me redolent of Doris's overarching and incredibly healthy contempt for the idea of literary prizes.

Especially fantastic is that her reaction — sadly tempered by a more measured statement a few minutes later, after, I imagine, much berating from the man with his arm in an artichoke — was in response to winning the Nobel prize. Because I've always wondered about the Nobel prize. When, can someone tell me, did the countries of the world meet and decide, “right, now one of us needs to figure as the absolute hub of taste and judgment for all human achievement and obviously that country should be: Sweden”. Sweden, a country that invented, basically, saunas, massage, fjord-based pornography and Abba. Who's on these judging panels? Sven-Göran Eriksson? Dolph Lundgren? Ulrika?

And as for literature: take away Strindberg and we're struggling, it has to be said, to name a great Swedish writer. Odd that, as six winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature over the years have been Swedish. I'm not, of course, suggesting any bias here: clearly Par Lägerkvist, Eyvind Johnson (didn't he play for Chelsea? Oh no, that was Erland Johnson), and Verner von Heidenstam deserve to be up there on that board in Stockholm with

T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, W.B. Yeats, and Elias Canetti. What do you mean, you've never heard of them? You surely must have read von Heidenstam's Folkunga Tradet (The Tree of the Folkungs), his inspired, epic story, it tells me on Wikipedia, of a clan of Swede chieftains in the Middle Ages? Shame on you.

Swede-baiting aside, I seriously believe that the Nobel Prize is just the supreme example of our culture's obesssive-compulsive need to keep raising the bar on how we calibrate achievement — as if, about prizes, we have a voice in our heads constantly saying “it's not prestigious enough”. I've actually read the text of Alfred Nobel's will (it's available online). It makes you wonder a number of things: first, how pissed off must his sons, Hjalmer and Ludvig, have been that their endowments were, presumably, cut in half by Alfred's decision to place most of his cash in setting up the prize. Secondly, why does Alfred insist that his remains be cremated in a “so-called crematorium”? Did he prefer that to a genuine one?

And last, how has the literature committee got away with ignoring the sub-clause in the sentence “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”. During the preceding year. As far as I can make out, the Nobel committee does vaguely follow this in all the other categories: but in literature — no doubt because of an insecurity about literature's value compared with such cast-iron Important Things as science and global peace — they have arbitrarily decided it must always be a big old Lifetime Award.

There's no harm in that — I'm sure Lessing deserves the prize, even though her great masterpieces are well behind her — but it's not what's in Alfred's will; and I would suggest that the reason for that is that what was in Alfred's will was not quite Super-Prestigious enough for the Nobel Committee. It might mean — horror of horrors — honouring a young person, perhaps one who had only written one book! Oh Christ...

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