STRANGE and wonderful changes are afoot underfoot. In the Stygian underworld of the Platform Gap (why didn't they make the trains wide enough?), the Mass Transit Railway is bent on brightening things up. It is experimenting with flowers and shrubs on the station concourses.
The corporation's Rob Noble last week said the experiment would take place at Kwai Fong station. Apparently Kwai Fong is something of a hot house of sociological discovery. It was there the MTR first put seats on the platforms and learned to its amazement that, except in the cases of government press conferences and electric chairs, people preferred to sit rather than stand. But it is interesting to note that in less successful societies, like Britain, station managers have been going the other way by reducing seating so that waiting passengers do more standing than the Brigade of Guards. The thinking is that benches are where persons of no fixed abode like to fix themselves.
Now, in Hong Kong, it is left again to the good people of Kwai Fong to answer an epic question which may forever change the direction of environmental science: Will they like flowers? Noble has his millions of clients carefully analysed and tightly defined. He said on radio there was a useful mix of residential and working types around Kwai Fong, making it ideal for the experiment.
I know what he means. 'Residential types' are straight-backed, raven-haired people wearing Burberry and flannels in pastels, carrying parasols and tugged along playfully by Afghan hounds. 'Working types' on the other hand have smudged faces, vests and plimsolls, and walk bent with their knuckles grazing the ground. If they can get the idea of flowers past that eclectic mix, they will go down anywhere.
Right down, I would have thought. From my experience of, say, Wan Chai station in the rush hour - which is every hour this side of midnight - I would imagine a scattering of defenceless pot plants would be more effectively trampled by impatient commuters than by a herd of African elephants which had just been tipped off about a new watering-hole and mud-bath centre opening on the other side of the savannah.
Noble is not one to be discouraged. The flora will be the specially reinforced type which simply bounces back. It will be artificial, indeed plastic.
Not a tinkle of apology for that could be detected. On the contrary, he was enthusiastic. Artificial flowers can be very colourful, he says, hinting they may even be more colourful than the real thing. Apparently, you can paint them all sorts of interesting colours unavailable to Nature.