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Life is full of mysteries. Here’s one: how can looking after a houseful of small children, some of them my own, take up so much time? By the time I’d hurled the sods into their various bedrooms last night, the will to write a column  – precious near the will to live – was but a distant memory.

There are so many other puzzles, from the Loch Ness Monster all the way down to the baffling conundrum of how Michael Gove gets through a single day – a single hour – without somebody slapping him round his dangling throwback chops with a wet haddock.

In these end days, conspiracy theorists live in paradise. Who killed Princess Diana? (I think the latest theory is that it was Neil Armstrong, the lover of the Duke of Edinburgh, to prevent her revealing the truth that Marilyn Monroe faked Kennedy’s assassination). Why does George Osborne have that weird buttock-clenched walk?

But of all these mysteries, the biggest riddle, to me, is this: why oh why oh why does everybody go on about Paul Simon’s album Graceland?

Now I know I shouldn’t get upset about this, because the people who constantly rave about the global importance of Graceland are sometimes the same people who consistently rate, as among history’s finest, albums by Radiohead, the band who always wear the Emperor’s new clothes on stage. Don’t get me wrong – I like some Radiohead songs very much indeed. But their albums have more filler in them than a Chigwell chav’s cut’n’shut Citroen Saxo.

I think it was the 571^st repeat of the documentary about Graceland on BBC4 that set me off. No, it was the timing of it. It came on the same night as BBC4 screened a performance by the great Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour.

Now this was African music in excelsis. African music that existed and prospered long before, and long after, Paul Simon. My shelves are filled with wonderful African music, from highlife and funk from the 60s and 70s through the Bhundu Boys’ irresistible jit-pop of the 80s and Fela Kuti’s unrivalled, righteous, canon, all the way to the titanic Toumani Diabate. Kuti towers at the peak of African music’s proud history of protest, from Hugh Masakela to the desert blues of the Touareg Tinariwen.

I could go on for many, many hours, but that one paragraph must serve to highlight just how fatuous is the notion that Paul Simon’s polite, glossy, shiny, hyped Graceland somehow popularised African music. African music was popular with hundreds of millions already and to suggest it needed a white American to make it popular is offensive in the extreme. So is the notion that Simon brought African music to a Western audience. Western audiences had been able to discover African music for decades. So is the notion that Simon turned Western audiences on to what is now called ‘world music’ – DJs in this country (like Andy Kershaw and Charlie Gillett) and particularly Europe had been playing music from Africa for years; and Western audiences included tens of thousands of people who, in moving to the west, brought their music with them.

The ridiculous fuss about Graceland typifies the way – and here’s our old theme – cliché and myth become truth. But the truth has always been this: Graceland is a perfectly adequate pop record, but in no way has it ever been fit to stand alongside the songs Paul Simon wrote in the 60s and 70s, the songs that more perfectly sum up a time and place and atmosphere than almost any I know.

“Kathy, I’m lost, I said though I knew she was sleeping;” “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio / a nation turns its lonely eyes to you”; “I’m standing on a railway station / got a ticket for my destination”;  “Hello darkness my old friend”; “I am just a poor boy / Though my story’s seldom told / I have squandered my resistance / For a pocket full of mumbles such are promises / All lies and jests / Still a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest”;   that’s what Paul Simon will always be, and should always be, remembered for. Not You Can Call Me sodding Al.

Lies and jests

Talking of which, in that lyric from The Boxer, I passed a tanker last week near Ivybridge on the A38. It was one of those waste tankers they use to empty septic tanks (for those of you who are not used to our country ways, septic tanks are what we have instead of sewer systems and every so often we have to get a lorry to come and take the ordure away).

On the side of the tanker were the familiar health and safety warnings about toxic loads, alongside this legend: “Warning: This vehicle is full of politicians’ promises”.