Spring fever in Cologne

Last week the indigenous white population of Cologne took to the streets once again to celebrate their annual ‘Crazy Days’ spring carnival. I stepped out of the hotel at ten o’clock on the morning of the designated ‘women’s day’, wondering how the women of Cologne had reacted to the events of New Year’s Eve, and to Mutti Merkel waving in a million-plus young Muslims per year to pep up the flagging gene pool of the 10 million indigenous males aged 20–30. As the Economist magazine’s ‘World in 2016’ supplement, throwing off all pretence, so excitedly puts it: ‘There is only one last hurdle to Germany officially becoming a land of immigrants, and it is politics.’

In the cobbled streets of Cologne’s Altstadt, I join a drunken crowd of Father Christmases, bloodied hospital patients, admirals, policemen, highwaymen, after-dinner speakers, sheep, robots, matelots, musketeers, airline pilots, football referees, Sherwood foresters, clowns, druids, more police (real ones this time, sprinting pell-mell through the crowds towards an incident), City slickers, Woodstock-era hippies, surgeons, deep-sea divers, ghostbusters, bishops, Arab sheiks, gnomes, fairies, seraphim, ancient Greeks, Romans, pharaohs, convicts, surfers, wizards, punks, fly agaric mushrooms and bananas.