I feel a massive over-reaction coming on. With most of Hong Kong on pee-pee patrol yesterday, hundreds of urinating and defecating Mainland babies were conspicuous by their absence (and today the ad to the right appears – can’t be a coincidence). But officials are petrified of what might happen if and when another Mongkok wee-wee-in-gutter incident takes place. Something must be done.

For a clue about what we can expect, cast your mind back a decade or two, when exceptional rain caused a landslide in some remote part of Hong Kong, and someone in a house at the foot of the hill was killed. Out of instinct, a few media or politician lowlifes blamed the government for allowing storms and gravity. Officials’ reflex action was to issue the order that such a freak tragedy must never happen again. Over the following years, every slope next to an inhabited or travelled area was covered in an unsightly, coarse, gray material known as ‘shotcrete’. It is estimated that by 2030, every incline, hill and mountain in Hong Kong will be covered in the stuff, complete with delicately hand-crafted holes through which trees can poke out.

Those trees, by the way, will all bear a little numbered plastic tag. That also dates back to a sad death at the hands of cruel forces of nature – this time biological as well as Newtonian. A 100-year old coral tree in Stanley fell and killed a passer-by. Anticipating blame, bureaucrats launched a campaign to register and tag every single plant over two feet tall not only in urban areas but throughout the countryside. Gallant officers of the Agricultural and Fisheries Department’s Dangerous Tree Control Unit hacked their way through hitherto unexplored patches of jungle deep in the New Territories in order to record and label the things. When the bureaucrats found, to their shock, that older trees fall over and die, and new ones mysteriously come up from under the ground as if out of thin air, the Unit was doubled in size in recognition of the fact that its work would never finish.

The Mainland baby pee-pee problem calls for a similar official response combining maximum autistic-type action with minimal imagination in order to be highly visible – and aesthetically obnoxious – while achieving no worthwhile result at all.

This will be Mongkok in weeks…

You heard it here first. Meanwhile (on the off-chance you find that hard to believe) the Health Secretary tells us to cut down on camel-riding…