"Do you ever get that 'did I miss a memo?' feeling? When something happens that seems so bizarre,the only way you can make sense of it is to posit a missing note went round to everyone else but left you off the distribution list, leaving you baffled and uncomprehending? I felt like that when the winner of the Nobel peace prize was announced this month.

It’s not, to be honest, a thing I usually pay much attention to. My mind is too full of important issues, like remembering what time to pick the child up from nursery, ensuring the house has reasonable supplies of food and loo paper and checking I’ve set up a series link for The Daily Show repeats. But this year, you see, Malala Yousafzai – the then-15-year-old (now 16) who was shot in thehead by the Taliban for her public campaigning against the regime’s education ban for girls in her region of Pakistan but survived and has continued her activism uncowed and unbowed – had been nominated and was the favourite to win.

And I, along with many others, thought this would be rather completely wonderful and therefore was keeping an interested eye on proceedings. However, the prize was won by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – the body that makes sure that states signed up to the Chemical Weapons Treaty complywith its rules. It is currently particularly busy in Syria trying to ensure that the capacity of President Bashar al-Assad and the rebel fighters to maimand murder with these indiscriminately brutal weapons is as limited as can be.

It’s important work, of course, which should make us all ashamed that we are not doing something better with our lives (particularly if you are something indefensibly parasitical like a Made In Chelsea star, or a columnist) but… it is, you know, kinda… well, that’s its job. It’s what it was set up to do. It’s what the people within it knew they were signed up to do and for which they are remunerated. Malala – unless she secretly invited the Taliban to shoot her in the head in the world’s riskiest PR stunt – not so much.

Lucy Mangan: Malala should have won a Nobel Prize