I have a problem with Rick Lax

A few days ago, I wrote a post in which I mentioned the British magician Paul Daniels, who had recently died. Like many people for whom Daniels was a part of growing up, I have been spending a bit too much time on the net, reading up on him and watching some of his routines on YouTube. And from there, the internet being what it is, I have been learning more than is healthy about conjuring in general, and also discovering some other fantastic acts. How can it be that I have, until now, remained ignorant of the existence of Penn and Teller?

Yes, this is what the internet is for.

Pick a card. Any card.

But to every silver lining there is a cloud, and so it was inevitable that I should also stumble across the grinning face of somebody who rejoices in the name of Rick Lax. I’m tempted to say his name sounds like a cure for constipation, but with a name like mine it’s probably wise not to milk that line too much.

It seems he’s making a big splash on Facebook right now. His page has over a million likes and a very impressive number of video views, which he is stridently proud of. I think perhaps if his ego wasn’t on display everywhere I wouldn’t pay him much attention. But let’s put that aside for the moment and consider Rick Lax, the magician.

The first of his videos I saw consisted of a mind-reading act. Think of a US state, take the last letter in that state’s name and hit “Like” to “lock in” your answer. Here’s a bunch of letters, some red, some white, some blue. Look for the letter you’re thinking of. It’s red, isn’t it?

It’s not hard to see how that one’s done. Yes, you could have chosen any one of 50 states, but if you take the last letters of those states, that only accounts for about half the alphabet. There are, by my reckoning, twenty states that end in the letter “A”.

It was one of those sub-par tricks that have been popping up on Facebook in recent years. It wasn’t even particularly well done: there were a few mistakes, including the “G” being the wrong colour, to the disappointment of the good citizens of Wyoming. I’d have moved on from there and not given it another thought, were it not for the fact that something, something, was nagging at me.

I think it was the blatant begging for “Likes”. You’re supposed to hit “Like” when you’ve watched the video and liked it. If you’re going to put pressure on people to “like” it halfway through, before the trick is even complete, you’re not really in a position to accuse Criss Angel of buying followers. Although at that point I didn’t know about his proud claim to be “America’s most popular”, the way the video screamed “Like me! Share me! Feed my craving for adulation!” irked me enough to want to find out more.

The problem I have with him is that I don’t know what to make of him. Fraud? Self-deprecating genius? Troll? I seriously have no idea.

Try this. Start with your age. Now add 5. Now subtract your age. You’re left with 5, am I right?

I can tell you’re not impressed. But this is seriously the level of all the mind-reading tricks of his that I have seen. When I was at school, we had similar mind-reading tricks that basically involved simple arithmetic, but at least you had to understand powers of two and algebra to figure out how they worked.

Think I’m exaggerating here? This is seriously one of his tricks (pay attention to steps 1 and 6):

1. Think of your age.
2. Add 3.
3. Subtract 5.
4. Add 7.
5. Push “Like” to, you know, “lock in your answer”.
6. Subtract your age.
7. Add 5.
8. Multiply by 2.
9. Add 1.
10. The answer is 21.

It seems to fool a very large number of people. Mr Lax himself warns people not to put any “spoilers” in the comments. Spoilers? This is elementary school stuff.

He also does some close-up table-top practical illusions, and they’re okay. They’re cheap tricks you can pick up at a store, and I later discovered why he was using them. They work, and will entertain your friends, but they’re not at the standard that would justify being called “mind-bending”. Pushing a coin “through” a sheet of latex? It’s not immediately obvious how that one’s done, but neither is it particularly amazing.

Digging deeper, I discovered that he works for a company that makes these tricks: he in fact designs them. Which is where my problem with him starts, because it makes sense of at least those videos. He’s demonstrating his own designs. All magicians have to start somewhere, and in any event as a way of enlivening a dinner party, they’re just the ticket; there’s a need for this sort of product, and that’s what he’s selling. I sort of wish he was a bit more honest about the fact, but perhaps that’s just how he does his marketing. All good.

Or not.

Because as I started poking around, I found that he seemed to be something quite big in the world of conjuring. He has, it seems, worked for David Copperfield. But he’s also given interviews and written articles all over the place; and in at least some of them he makes a plea for originality (and manages to imply that he counts himself as one of the 1% of truly original illusionists).

Originality is not, on the evidence I’ve so far seen, his greatest strength. Perhaps his most visually impressive trick is the one where he pushes a knife into his finger (although it's a pity that the fake blood looks like the thin dribble of ketchup you get when you forget to shake the bottle). Great stuff, but his claim to originality wears a little thin given that this is basically just a scaled-down version of the “X-sword” illusion created by somebody called Adam Steinfeld about twenty years ago. (Did I mention I’d recently been reading up on conjuring?)

But then, he did appear on a Penn and Teller show called Fool Us, in which magicians perform tricks in the hope that Penn and Teller would be unable to work out how it was done. Lax succeeded in fooling the duo with a card trick.

He’s good with a theatre audience, that’s for sure. But what of the trick?

Well, it seems impressive to me. It foxed Penn and Teller, or so it seems. This is miles away from the extraordinarily lame think-of-a-number stuff he serves up on Facebook. This, finally, is a man I could imagine working for David Copperfield.

And then you disappear down the rabbit-hole of internet forums of amateur magicians and afficionados complaining that the trick wasn’t that impressive, and that they could think of ways it could very easily be done. That may be beginners’ bravado (“Ooh, I could do that!”), but the accusation that Penn and Teller are in fact rewarding acts they liked as opposed to acts that actually outwitted them is hard to dismiss. Be that as it may, it is, undeniably, a good and highly polished routine, entertaining and, to those of us who aren’t magicians, baffling. Well, he says he was once thrown out of a casino for card-counting, so it could have been a memory feat, but still a very impressive one.

And there you have it: the two sides of Rick Lax. There’s the lame, attention-seeking, egotistical purveyor of cheap tricks taking advantage of the inexperienced and gullible to feed his ego; and then there’s the accomplished, charismatic performer who leaves the professionals (if not the I-know-it-all you-can’t-teach-me-anything beginners) scratching their heads.

There’s only one way I can make sense of this. One of the things he does is write about deceptive techniques used in places like Las Vegas, and how not to fall victim to them. Why not? Other magicians, like James Randi, Derren Brown and even Paul Daniels, have warned people against charlatans who use the same techniques they do, but in order to deceive and defraud rather than for entertainment. Maybe Rick Lax’s Facebook page is part of some sort of social experiment for his next book?

When a celebrity dies

This post is going to land me in a lot of trouble. I am going to be accused of heartlessness and insensitivity. Inevitably I’ll be told “if you don’t like it, ignore it,” which raises the question: how can I know to ignore something if I ignore it? People will explain that they need to express their “grief”, and I shouldn’t be trying to stop them.

Yet another celebrity has died. This time, it’s Garry Shandling.

Well, that’s sad. Not that I had any particular fondness for the man or even paid much attention to his work, but no man is an island and all that. I expect he was a great influence on the latest generation of comedians, to whom he has now passed the baton. It’s up to them now.

Last week it was Paul Daniels. If you’re not British, you may be asking: “Paul who?” Paul Daniels, a British magician who was instrumental in bringing conjuring acts to the mainstream. When he started his showbiz career, magicians were men in top hats and capes who came on stage accompanied by a smiling assistant and mystical music, and silently performed trick after routine trick to dutiful applause. Daniels was one of a new breed of acts who looked to add something extra — for him, it was humour, comedy and occasionally even slapstick — to make it interesting and fun, and also engaged the audience, inspiring the modern trend for close-up magic. Look him up on YouTube: this is the raw stuff out of which the likes of Derren Brown cut their cloth.

There was a time in the 80s when Paul Daniels was constantly on British TV (as well as a magician he was a quiz show host), so he was a big part of my childhood. He died last week, aged 77. Well, that’s sad. But his legacy lives on.

The “outpouring of grief”, though, that’s what gets me. In the sense that it irritates me greatly. All over social media, people fall over themselves to express their grief and shock at the passing away of somebody they may possibly have met once in their lives, and hadn’t even thought about for many years. It’s not just Shandling and Daniels, but the whole lot of them: actors, singers, writers, even record producers that few people had ever heard of until they died, but had something to do with the Beatles and therefore it is a great and profound shock.

And always the same, tired old clichés. “I have no words” (yes you do, you just used four of them). “A legend” (almost certainly not). “Oh, no” (what, did you just lose a bet or something?). “Gutted”, “devastated”, “numb with shock” — no, you’re not, because five minutes later you shared yet another lame Trump meme and commented “This is hilarious.”

And sometimes the sentiments are patently ridiculous. The number of people who were “shocked” at the death of Paul Daniels was quite remarkable, given that just one month previously all the British news media reported that he’d been diagnosed with a fatal and inoperable brain tumour. “Shocking” is the one thing Daniels’s death wasn’t, since we were all expecting it. On the contrary, it was quite merciful: his family said his tumour was preventing him from processing new information, so he didn’t know he was dying. He watched some TV, ate some ice-cream, fell asleep and then didn’t wake up. I’ll tell you one thing: that’s how I want to go.

And all this is from people who never actually knew him. Perhaps once they’d been “a volunteer from the audience”, or maybe they have his autograph or a selfie with him. They never knew the man, not really. Half of them might not have liked him much if they did know him: he had, for example, some pretty trenchant views on homelessness and taxation that a lot of people found unsavoury. He also boasted that, for example, without him there would be no David Copperfield, which is quite a claim. Whether it’s true or not, it’s not something I want him to be banging on about for half an hour in the pub.

If this is how people react to the expected death of somebody they never knew, one wonders how they might react to the sudden death of a near relative.

And then there are the woeful posts, tweets and so on about how so many awesome celebrities are dying at the moment. Unthinkingly, people take to the internet to broadcast their belief that God is just being mean and taking all the popular people, leaving us all down here bereft of their wit, genius, musical ability, or whatever qualities they were deemed to have.

Well, first of all, barely a week goes by without some celebrity somewhere dying. It’s what all celebrities do sooner or later. It’s what all of us do sooner or later. You’re going to have to face up to that one.

Second, the phonograph was invented in 1877, since when we have had the ability to record performances more or less permanently. We still have access to all these celebrities’ work, and in most cases those celebrities had stopped producing new material. In some cases — James Dean springs to mind — very promising careers are cut short. But in most, the deceased already has their best work behind them.

And third, as I hinted above, if they’re any good, their legacy will live on in the next generation. People who were inspired by them will add their own ingredients to the mix and keep that legacy alive. The good ones will do so creatively, and become the next great “legends” of their time, with fresh approaches and new ideas to keep everything moving along, making life interesting and adding to the great store of everything that is good and fun. Nothing is being taken away.

When somebody famous dies, it’s reported in the media. There’s no need for everybody to also splash it all over their social media feeds with insincere expressions of the kinds of emotion that the deceased’s immediate family may be feeling. And it is insincere, because you don’t really feel those emotions.

Ah, but how could I possibly know you don’t really feel those emotions? Because if you did, you wouldn’t be shouting them out to the bottomless void that is the internet. You would be contacting the family, expressing your condolences to them and asking if there’s anything you can do. And don’t forget, if I can see your “grief-stricken” posts, I can probably see the rest of your social media feed, and I can see all the goofy selfies you posted that day, the Russian dashcam video you shared and the fact that you’re “ecstatic” about your team’s ability to carry a ball over a line more times than the other team.

Security theatre

Once again, the news is dominated by a terrorist attack, this time in Brussels. At the time of writing, something like two dozen people are reported to have died in what seem like coordinated attacks on an airport and a metro station (a death toll which is likely to rise, as death tolls usually do). Once again, as the dust settles on scenes of what can certainly be called mass murder, thoughts turn to how vulnerable we all are, and how we can protect ourselves.

It’s a natural — and, to be honest, perfectly sane — reaction. It’s a shocking thing to have happen, and all the more shocking now that modern technology means that minutes after the event, we can see uncensored pictures and videos of the desolation and the walking wounded, bringing an even greater sense of immediacy to it all. It is, of course, likely perfectly true that this is exactly “what the terrorists want”, although by now we should probably recognise that pointing this out every time isn’t very helpful.

The problem, I think, is that security theatre will be stepped up, because the focus of the attacks was an airport.

“Security theatre” is basically the phrase used to describe security measures that are put in place not because they actually work, but because they make people believe they are safe. After 9/11, airport security was stepped up to quite ludicrous levels, and there is no evidence that this has prevented, or even could prevent, a single terrorist attack. In fact, the security measures don’t even appear to work, and attacks have continued. The real security goes on behind the scenes: detective work, surveillance and intelligence, that kind of thing. It’s when these methods fail that attacks can take place.

The obvious flaw in the airport security we currently have is this: even if it prevents people from taking bombs onto place, it doesn’t prevent bombings — as we have now seen. If they can’t bomb planes, they’ll bomb terminals.

I’ve long speculated about this. If I were a terrorist intent on dying for my cause, I’d go to an airport with my explosives and a boarding pass (which can very easily be faked, by the way). It would be a major airport at a busy time, and I’d get into the queue for security, which is usually a crush because airports weren’t built with this kind of security in mind. And in the middle of that crowd, I’d detonate my bomb. I suspect the casualty list would be extremely high: typically, these queues are trapped in narrow areas, hampered by the sheer number of people, the X-ray machines and those barriers they use to make the queues snake around so they can pack as many people into a tight space as possible. I could certain shut down the whole terminal, probably for a long time.

Of course, detonating a bomb almost anywhere in an airport would be extremely effective.

So, it’s probably natural to want to put security at the entrance to the terminal itself. But that doesn't solve the problem: it simply moves it elsewhere. Because then you’d just have crowds of people waiting for security outside the terminal instead of inside it, so that’s where a terrorist would do the bombing.

Or not. A terrorist could, instead, attack something else. On this occasion, they did attack the Brussels metro as well — why assume they wouldn’t? In the 7/7 bombings in London, 56 people died and over 700 were injured when bombers attacked three underground stations and a bus. Much more recently, several people were killed in a suicide bombing attack in Istanbul. Ankara saw over 100 people die last year, another 30 last month (including one German tourist from a neighbouring village to mine) and nearly 40 just a few days ago. And I’m sure we could all reel off a list of equally devastating terrorist attacks that had nothing to do with airports, starting with the Paris attacks last year that killed over 100.

The thing is, airport security isn’t doing anything; and increased airport security will also do nothing. The terrorists will simply target other things: metro and railway stations, shopping malls, night clubs, busy plazas, markets, you name it. What are we to do, put security checkpoints on every street corner?

This isn’t how to fight terrorism. It may be seen as a quick way to calm the nerves of terrified citizens, but that only works until the next attack. What’s actually needed is proper, competent behind-the-scenes intelligence work that actually targets the right people (mass surveillance of all our communications is another distraction, but that’s an entirely different subject). That’s where the resources need to be directed, not pointless security theatre.

Bonnie’s moustache

I have two cats called, with staggering originality, Bonnie and Clyde. Some of you no doubt know this already, but for the sake of those who don’t, Clyde is black and Bonnie is all black-and-white blotches. It’s useful, as it helps us to tell them apart.

One of Bonnie’s distinctive features is a black smudge on her top lip, which often elicits comment. Here’s a mugshot:

This shouldn’t really be an issue, of course, but there’s no end of people who draw comparisons between her upper lip and the facial hair of Adolf Hitler. Personally, I think that’s unfair (although I will concede that in this photo, she does strike a distinctly Hitlerish pose). If I thought she did look like the notorious dictator, I would submit that photo to the website Cats That Look Like Hitler, but I don’t think she does. Not unless somebody can find a picture of Adolf after a hilarious shaving accident.

My wife has more problems with this than I do. When describing Bonnie to other people, she’ll go all coy and say, “She has half of a... well, the only way I can describe it is half a Hitler moustache,” and then apologize profusely for mentioning him who should not be mentioned (not to be confused with him who should not be named). I have suggested she describe it as a Charlie Chaplin moustache, but she seems to prefer social awkwardness.

Be that as it may: whenever Bonnie has a cameo in one of my videos, I can be sure that somebody is going to mention my “Hitler cat”. If you do, that is your right: just know that she is, in fact, half a Chaplin cat. (We don’t know what the other half is, but it has us scared enough without invoking Hitler.)

Social media in 1980

When crusty old folk like me moan that the young whippersnappers of today are obsessed with social media and spend all their time staring at their phones instead of talking to each other, it’s often pointed out that we were never any good at talking to each other. Back in the 1980s, we used to listen to cassette tapes and watch TV: this generation has simply found new ways of ignoring each other.

And, I have to admit, that’s entirely correct. We tend to see our own childhoods through rose-tinted glasses, but they were just as awful back then as they are now. To illustrate the point, here’s a dramatization of a typical scene from 1980. Mr and Mrs Smith and their good friends, Mr and Mrs Jones, have gone out for a meal together. They’ve just ordered, and are waiting for their meals to arrive.

Mrs Smith: Hey, did you see Shoestring last night?

Mr Smith: Yes, brilliant episode! The bit where—

Mrs Jones: Oh, no, please don’t say any more! I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve been videotaping it, you see, so I don’t want to hear any spoilers.

Mr Smith: Oh, sorry.

(There is an awkward silence.)

Mr Jones: Well... we’ve been getting some awful weather lately.

Mrs Smith: Yes, but they say it should clear up in the next day or two.

Mrs Jones: Really? (She takes a sheaf of paper out of her bag and unfolds them. They’re meteorological maps.) Ah yes, it looks like this system will bring warm weather up from the Azores.

Mr Smith: The Azores? Are you sure?

Mrs Jones: Those are the Azores, aren't they?

Mr Smith: I’m pretty sure those are the Balearic Islands.

Mr Jones: Easy way to settle this. (He throws a large atlas onto the table, opens it up and starts flicking through the pages.) Hang on... North America... South America... Africa... hmm, page 352...

Mrs Jones: I don’t really think it’s that important...

Mr Jones: Hush! ...around here somewhere...

Mrs Smith: Anyway, how’s your Eric? Still at—

Mr Jones: AHA! Here they are! And... they’re not the Azores or the Balearics. Those are the Canary Islands.

(A phone rings.)

Mrs Jones: Oh, sorry, I have to answer this one. Do excuse me. (She takes a large, ringing, rotary-dial telephone out of her bag and lifts the receiver.) Yes? ... No, it’s in the living room. ... I told you. ... Well, use your eyes! ... On the coffee table. ... No, the coffee table. ... Okay, good. ... No, that’s fine. ... About ten-thirty. ... Good. ... Listen, I can’t talk now. ... See you then. ... Bye. (She hangs up.) Sorry about that. Typical Bridget.

Mr Jones: Bridget! Tsk!

Couldn’t blame autocorrect in those days.

(A breathless messenger jogs into the restaurant.)

Messenger: Text message for Mr Smith!

Mr Smith: That’s me! (The messenger gives him the message.) Excuse me just one moment. (He heaves a typewriter onto the table, feeds in a sheet of paper, types a few words, and hands the paper to the messenger.) Reply with this, please.

Mr Jones: Ah, here comes the food.

(A couple of waiters serve the food.)

Mr Smith: Right, then. (He grabs his Polaroid camera and takes a photograph of his food. Then he takes the photo to the door of the restaurant, opens the door, and holds up the photograph for all to see.) TUCKING IN TO THIS! HASHTAG FOODPORN!

Some passers-by: LIKE!

Another passer-by: YOU SUCK!

Mrs Jones: Isn’t modern technology wonderful?

(A town cryer walks into the restaurant and rings his bell.)

Town cryer: Hear ye! Hear ye! Ten scary things you should know about ABBA! Number seven will blow your mind!

So, what happened in Cologne?

Right now, large sections of the world’s media are full of reports of the events that happened in front of the main railway station in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. A lot of these reports make harrowing reading: according to at least some of them, about a thousand men of swarthy appearance sexually assaulted and raped a number of women.

The impression you may have got from this is of a thousand immigrants descending on the station forecourt and basically gang-raping dozens of women, while police and fellow revellers looked on impassively. You may ask, as many have, why it took so long for this to be reported, and why the German government isn’t condemning it.

Except that that’s not quite what happened.

What actually happened is still the subject of a police investigation. And I don’t want to downplay the absolute awfulness of the incident: unless 80 or 90 women have deliberately filed false charges, at least that number of women were sexually assaulted. That behaviour is unacceptable, and has no place in any society. I was brought up never to touch women against their will. The people who did this need to be found and punished, and there is no excuse for molesting women (or men, for that matter) and making them fear for their safety.

So, let’s take it as read that I am not in any way trying to excuse the people who did this, and move on.

The reports circulating in even very respectable sections of the media are confused and partly contradict each other. Fortunately for us, my local paper this morning carried an article explaining what, actually, the police are saying about the event, and it’s not very much.

Firstly, there were actually two different incidents, although they may be connected (part of the police investigation is involved in establishing whether or not there is a link).

In the first incident, a group of men, as many as 1,000, started throwing bangers into the crowd, prompting the police to move in and clear the area to prevent a panic.

This needs some explanation. A central feature of German New Year’s Eve celebration, as it is in many parts of the world, is noisy fireworks. This goes back to an ancient tradition in which evil spirits were to be scared off at the start of the new year. But unlike, say, Guy Fawke’s Night in the UK, German New Year’s Eve sees members of the public buying vast arsenals of fireworks and letting them off in public spaces, which is great fun for the emergency services who have nothing better to do than put out fires and rush people to hospital.

The best-selling firework is the banger — known as Böller. It’s little more than a tube filled with gunpowder and a fuse. Light the fuse, throw the banger on the ground and it explodes with a bang. Harmless fun, although some people manage to get hold of bangers that are illegal in Germany and pack a much bigger punch, enough to cause injury or thousands of euros’ worth of damage to a car. Anyone who’s ever been in a German city between Christmas and New Year knows what that’s like: some ne’er-do-wells seem to think it fun to throw bangers under the feet of unsuspecting passers-by, and sometimes it can sound like a couple of rival gangs shooting at each other.

So, that was one thing. 1,000 men irresponsibly throwing little fireworks around. That’s where the number 1,000 came from.

The sexual assaults happened after that. Victims reported finding themselves surrounded by a small group of men and groped, and then discovering they’d been robbed. At least one of the reported incidents was so severe, that it may fit the legal definition of rape.

The “legal definition of rape”, by the way, is a concept you have to be careful with. Different legal systems define rape in different ways, which is why you can’t compare statistics (Sweden has a very high incidence of rape at least partly because it has an unusually wide definition of rape).

In the case of Germany, section 177 of the penal code (§ 177 StGB) talks of sexual assault and rape as essentially the same thing. Sexual assault is committed when a person uses the threat of violence to force the victim to perform a sexual act or allow a sexual act to be performed on them. It is considered more serious if some sort of penetration occurs, which is what is meant by “the legal definition of rape”. It doesn’t matter, by the way, whether the attacker penetrates the victim or forces the victim to penetrate him (or, much more rarely of course, her). And it also doesn’t matter which body part penetrates what orifice. I don’t know the details of the attack (only the people involved and the police know that), but that could, if I’ve understood correctly, be a French kiss. Which is horrible and distressing and rightly considered rape; but in a crowd it’s the sort of thing that could happen right next to you without noticing. It’s not as if the victim was stripped of her underwear and forced to undergo brutal vaginal sex right under the noses of the police as everybody else stood by and did nothing.

What happened was bad. It’s just not what the press seem to think happened.

Basically, these two things were conflated by the press. Certainly, the police are trying to establish whether there is a connection. So far they’re only saying that it’s “conceivable” that some of the men who had been throwing bangers around were also involved in the sexual assaults.

What the police seem to think they’re looking at here — and this is me reading between the lines, not anything that’s been said officially — is a band of pickpockets. Well, yes, they’re also guilty of sexual assault, but the victims reported also having their things stolen. The sexual assault, it seems, wasn’t what it was about. The sexual assault was being used as a distraction to allow the theft to take place. It’s a frightning new version of one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Which doesn’t make the sexual assault any better. We’re looking at people who are prepared to violate women simply to be able commit acts of petty theft. There’s nothing “better” about that.

EDIT, 20:00 CET: The police have announced that they’re looking into the possibility of this being a case of organised crime. A number of suspects have been identified, but there are conflicting reports over how many, and whether they have been arrested or whether some individuals who were arrested a few days ago are included in that number.

But this has been spun out into a story of a thousand men forcing themselves on a much smaller number of women. People are talking about this as if this was some act of gang-rape on a massive scale. How can women possibly defend themselves, they’re asking, when they’re surrounded by a thousand men as they’re being brutally raped?

That didn’t happen. The number of men involved in the sexual assault is unknown. It could be as few as five. It could be as many as thirty or forty. There was an alarmingly high number of incidents in which individual women were molested by a small number of men. That’s pretty much all we know.

All this is bad enough. But things have got worse. I don’t mean to say, by the way, that what happened next was worse than the sexual assault. I mean that what happened next made an already awful situation just a bit more awful.

The incident didn’t initially get a great deal of attention. It was reported, but the scale of what had happened wasn’t known. Part of the reason for this is that eighty or ninety women didn’t all file charges en masse. Rather, over the next couple of days, women came forward to file charges.

At first, the police will have dutifully taken down the details and sighed heavily: these were serious incidents, but the chances of actually identifying the culprits are very slim. But more and more women came forward, and as the numbers increased, the police slowly came to realise that they were dealing with something really big. Some of the victims will have delayed coming forward because they were too upset or frightened — this is quite a common occurrance.

So it took a few days for the true scale of the incident to become evident. It’s not that the press, or the police, or anyone else, tried to cover it up. It was reported at the time, but was eclipsed by what was, at the time, a much bigger story: police in Munich had been forced to evacuate two railway stations following a credible tip-off of a possible terrorist attack, and were now trying to identify, locate and apprehend the alleged terrorists. That’s the story that grabbed the national headlines and forced the story of what at the time was a small number of women reporting being groped onto the inside pages.

Since then, the latter story has grown. One factor in its growth is the growing realisation that it’s bigger than was originally thought. Unfortunately, a more important factor has been extremist right-wing propaganda.

Most of the victims described their attackers as being of “north African or Arab” appearance.

There are a lot of people in Germany who fit that description. Even I fit that description, even though as far as I can tell I don’t have any ancestors from north Africa or Arabia: but I have encountered people who assumed I was from Spain, Turkey, Israel, Palestine and, on one memorable occasion, Pakistan. Turks have walked up to me and spoken to me in Turkish.

There are, in Germany, nearly three million people who hold or once held Turkish passports, or have at least one parent who was born in Turkey. There are many millions more who have Turkish grandparents. All those people could be said to fit the description.

The problem is that right-wing extremist groups have seized on this. Now, it’s not merely 1,000 men brutally gang-raping women. Now, it’s 1,000 immigrants brutally gang-raping women. And this has led to certain, very loud and abusive, sections of society to lead a crusade against the German government’s policy on the refugee crisis. “This is what happens,” they say, “when we open the floodgates and allow Muslims to invade us.”

Suddenly, this becomes a race issue. Wild, and widely debunked, stories of immigrants have been circulating, alleging things like routine mass rape among Syrian refugees. These stories have been investigated, and they are all false. Studies have been conducted and reveal that the refugees Germany has taken on so far commit crimes at roughly the same rate as native Germans do. It turns out, they’re human too.

And it’s worth pointing out that Germans commit heinous crimes as well. The same newspaper that landed on my breakfast table this morning carrying an article explaining what the actual known facts are also carries a front-page report of the sentencing of a man known only as “Chris” (his full name can’t be published for legal reasons). He set up a Facebook page pretending to be a photographer, and contacted very young women asking them to take part in photo-shoots. He claimed it was part of an anti-alcohol campaign showing the effects of drinking too much, and so persuaded them to down so much alcohol that they passed out. Then he raped them.

I don’t think this is any more or less horrifying than the Cologne incident. It’s just as cold and calculating, with the only real difference being that in the case of “Chris”, the sexual assault was the end, not the means to a different end. Which, materially, doesn’t make that much difference.

If you haven’t heard about “Chris”, it’s not because that case has been hushed up. It’s just not what people on social media are talking about right now.

Similarly, if you hadn’t heard about the Cologne incident until a day or two ago, it’s not because that case was hushed up either. That doesn’t stop extremists from loudly complaining of a cover-up by “the lying press”. Why, they ask, is the press censoring the story? The press isn’t: they just weren’t paying attention.

So now we’re being forced into a conversation about the wisdom of Angela Merkel’s Willkommenskultur, which is not what this story should be about. There is not one single shred of evidence that the one thing has to do with the other, but that’s the narrative that’s being pushed. And because it’s being pushed, it’s what the media are talking about. And so fact becomes confused with propaganda, and the whole issue blows up not necessarily out of proportion, but for the wrong reasons.

And so the mayor of Cologne does what politicians do in these situations: since politicians are routinely criticised when they say nothing about a major news story, they feel the need to say something. Unfortunately, they often make things even worse, especially when caught off-guard.

Much of what Henriette Reker said at her press conference was pretty unremarkable. There is no evidence the offences were committed by refugees. The police are investigating. The scale of the problem only started to become clear the following morning.

Then a journalist asked a question: how could women protect themselves?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Perhaps Reker should have recognised the potential for a massive foul-up here, but, with all the grace and diplomacy of an elephant, elected to answer the question.

She should have reframed it. She should have explained that we all have a duty towards each other, and that we are all responsible for our own actions. That victim-blaming is not the right response. That we should be looking at ways of ensuing that women can feel safe without having to take special gender-specific precautions.

But no; she answered the question that was asked, and did so badly.

Not completely badly: take out the "advice for women" part, and some of it is advice I, as a man, have been given: make sure you’re with friends, demand the help of bystanders if you are attacked, report any incidents to the police. Not all of it brilliant advice, but not especially bad; it just shouldn’t have been directed specifically at women.

But one piece of advice she gave stands out as particularly divorced from any semblance of reality: that “there is always the option of keeping a certain distance of at least an arm’s length”. Oh, brilliant.

That was pretty awful. But then social media did its thing and focused on that one sentence. And as a consequence, so did the press. Now it’s no longer even about the actual sexual assault, but about the public shaming of the mayor of Cologne as a victim-blaming rape apologist, as if she had just issued some kind of press release lecturing women on how not to get raped. What it actually is, if we’re going to be honest, is a politician’s stupid answer to a stupid question. The rest of the press conference will be forgotten, and with it, the official version of the current situation. Which in turn suits the right-wing conspiracy theorists.

This whole thing started off being horrific. It’s not being made any better by misreporting, political propaganda and, now, a witch-hunt.

One last thing. Questions are, rightly, being raised about the Cologne Carnival. This is a very famous event in which vast crowds gather: in the light of the police’s failure to keep women safe on New Year’s Eve, how safe are they going to be at the Carnival?

Well, on New Year’s Eve, the police say they were taken by surprise. There were up to 200 officers there, but they weren’t expecting this kind of trouble. It had never happened before.

The police officers’ union says that the police presence was “normal” for this type of event. It wasn’t a demonstration, but a good-natured public gathering. They might have been expecting some incidents: pickpockets are always a problem in crowds, or there might be some isolated drunken brawls, that kind of thing. Sexual assault on such a large scale is something the German police have never before encountered. To quote Dirk Weber, spokesman for the Cologne police: “We are experienced in crowd situations. But we didn’t reckon with this modus operandi.”

The Carnival, though, is a different matter. It’s traditionally associated with the suspension of the usual morals, but unfortunately a lot of men — German men, it must be pointed out — still think that’s a licence for them to, well, basically rape women. As far as Carnival is concered, the police are always on extra high alert for this type of incident.

That’s not say that you’d be safe from sexual assault at Carnival, of course. Sadly, there is always a risk. But on New Year’s Eve, the police were wrongfooted in a way that is, we hope, less likely at Carnival.

Hermann: the gift that keeps on giving... and giving... and giving...

If you’re German, you may have encountered the “Hermann” (or “Herman”), sometimes known as a “friendship cake”. The idea is that somebody gives you a tub of cake mix and a set of instructions: over the next ten days you follow the instructions, adding ingredients like flour, milk and sugar, as it sits there bubbling away and smelling of beer. Then you divide the mix into four or five portions, bake one, keep one to start a new batch, and give the others away.

It’s a sort of culinary chain letter, a bit like the Amish friendship bread. And like the friendship bread, if you’re not careful, it can take over the world. Or at least make you heartily sick of the sight of it.

My wife acquired a portion of Hermann just before Christmas, explaining to me that she’d wanted one. Well, okay. This one came with a set of instructions that claimed the original batch had been made by Pope Francis himself, a claim neither of us was prepared to believe. Pope Francis, being a theologian, is no doubt familiar with the Biblical image of a small amount of yeast working its way through the whole batch of dough, which of course is how the Hermann works. And also why it stinks of beer. Pope Francis, though, has more important things on his mind, and even if he does take the bus to work, I don’t know how much baking he does these days.

Be that as it may, the thing bubbled and fumed all over Christmas, as if we didn’t have enough to eat. And the time came to bake one portion and give the others away in a beautiful gesture of human sharing, community and love.

Which is where we hit a snag. The baking part went well — although, having just feasted on unacceptable quantities of fine food, it took an effort of will to eat a slice of Hermann.

The giving away part fared less well. In fact, it was a complete disaster: nobody wanted any of it.

The problem is that most of our friends and family here in Germany, not to mention all of our neighbours, lived through the Peace and Ecology Era of the 1980s — a decade in which Hermann featured as heavily as it did in the nation’s stomachs. The downside of this outpouring of metaphorical whatnot was the glut of Hermann, a bubbling mass of sourdough that threatened, like a poorly-conceived Doctor Who monster, to take over the planet and wipe out the human race. Nobody got around to baking anything but Hermann, because that was all there was. No sooner had a family laid the last bit of Hermann to rest than they were confronted by a neighbour bearing a Tupperware bowl, a grubby piece of paper and a cheery smile.

Everyone now alive and older than about 30 vividly remembers months of Hermann. And when the Hermann curse was finally lifted, Germans collectively vowed: “Never again.”

So we never did find anyone to give Hermann a loving home, and we couldn’t face the prospect of baking even more of it. Eventually, it grew a crust and stopped bubbling, at which point we surreptitiously disposed of the remains.

Please don’t tell the Pope.