Truth can also be calmer and quieter than fiction. So there's supposed to be a crowd of Bulgarians jostling outside the British visa office in Sofia, eager to lead a new throng of immigrants as Romania and Bulgaria join the European Union club. "Experts" tell the Daily Mail that as many as 350,000 more east Europeans are on their way here to give John Reid and assorted local councils the collywobbles.
Yet on the spot, strangely, you find no queue of any sort, just a tiny trickle of routine humanity coming and going. What about those crowd pictures (in the Mail) the other day, then? Ah! They were taken, rather artfully it seems, on the day after a UK bank holiday, when 48 hours' worth of custom got truncated into 24: say, 15 or 16 applicants rather than eight.
Relax, says my most plugged-in Bulgarian friend. Of course, some ordinary workers will want to roam the union in search of a better-paid job. But they have mostly gone to Spain, Portugal and France thus far (because the climate is better), and that's surely where any small second wave will follow. Well-trained, English-speaking professionals working in computers, medicine, engineering and the rest? They're different, and some of them might head for Britain, perhaps. But whoever found cats alarmed about extra cream?
And relax, too, says one of the top law enforcement officers covering this precise patch, with a sardonic grin. London won't suddenly be flooded with sinister Bulgarian Mr Bigs because "they're all in London already". Maybe the tabloids will still be able to confect an outcry or two. Sofia's journalism bars still buzz over tales of a British redtop trying to hire a local prostitute to jet into Heathrow on January 1, so that she could star in some sex-trade shocker.
But if you want the problems of immigration most absorbing Bulgarian attention at the moment, then look a touch closer to home: at the 3,000 Brits, seeking places in the cut-price sun, who have arrived to live, and often to set up property businesses that will keep more crowds coming. Have luxury villas but rather lack drains as yet. Once more, it is local-council wailing about resources that captures the headlines. Once more the truth is both quiet and calm.
Stand in the gallery of Bulgaria's parliament and look down on MPs doing their job - or rather sitting reading newspapers through various promulgations. No confrontations, no benches opposite and bawled insults. It's a relaxed morning in the shadow of an imminent presidential election.
And the issues on the table for detailed discussion are consensual ones, too. Has the anti-corruption select committee got a draft bill clamping down on corruption? Indeed: featuring such wonders as the right to run advertisements in local newspapers denouncing politicians who cross the line. Has the ethical select committee evolved a code of practice that many western countries might envy? Indeed: the far corners of sleaze are being swept. The business of shaping up for Europe is almost complete.
And - quietly, calmly - pause over something so familiar as to no longer seem remarkable. It is 17 years since Bulgaria shrugged off the dead hand of Moscow, pulled down some of the more grotesque Soviet statues, and tottered into bizarre, heady freedom as its king returned from exile to play political saviour (very badly). It has taken at least a painstaking decade of targets and reforms to meet European Union requirements. But those deeds are mostly done. Now, without many illusions or undue excitement, another stable European democracy is in the bag. Welcome to the club.
This could, glancing east, be rootless Georgia, or Ukraine, suddenly tugged and bullied by a resurgent Kremlin. This could be a political earthquake zone. Instead, Sofia has made a considered, life-changing choice. Do we value, or even much notice, that achievement?
General Sir Richard Dannatt is storm centre when he talks about "naive hopes" for liberal democracy in Iraq, and aims for a "lower ambition". But our union, nation by nation, has marched on, without naivety, until it is 27 strong. And it will not, and cannot, stop there. Croatia waits at the gate. Bosnia, Macedonia and the rest are standing in line. Diplomats General Dannatt can meet in Whitehall any day have Kosovo on their eventual list: troops out for a higher ambition.
This evening, by chance, comes the third lecture in memory of Hugo Young, at Chatham House. Last year Gordon Brown lectured - and did not mention Europe. This year Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission, will surely do better. "Only in mid-career, to my shame, did I begin to understand that, for Britain, Europe is the issue overshadowing all others," Hugo wrote in his final book. Come in Sofia, come in Bucharest! To our shame, we seem to have lost the ability to marvel and to cheer.
Peter Preston