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The time may have come, as the Walrus said, to talk of many things, but perhaps not shoes and ships and sealing-wax and whether pigs have wings; and let's not talk about why the sea is boiling hot - climate change, as you no doubt know - nor waste our time on kings.
Instead, since it is getting near that time of year in Beijing when venturing outside without a hat means having the cold hands of winter squeeze the brains from our heads like toothpaste from a tube, let's focus our attention on cabbages for a moment, that way we can wander around the warmer days of summer a while before we get too discombobulated.
Last year, if you were at the Midi Music Festival in Beijing you might have come across some teenagers walking cabbage heads around on leashes as if they were overstuffed poodles dyed green. There was some chatter that this was an outcome of young people's isolation in the metropolis, but it appears to have been part of artist Han Bing's Walking the Cabbage Series.
This summer, plants and art once more combined, if somewhat more commercially, at Beijing's art park, 798, where, were you strolling around, you no doubt encountered people with plants sprouting from their hair - although, disappointingly, these budding greeneries, unlike Han's cabbages, turn out to be made of plastic.
Next summer, if the trend continues, we might be able to look forward to people going green to be seen by sporting body modifications using plants; perhaps tomatoes grafted onto arms or green beans growing from chests, maybe even an olive tree growing out of a head.
However, in all probability, that last one may be a little far-fetched, since most of us are likely a tad reluctant to dig out some of the cabbages we already have in your heads, even for the environment, art or sustenance. Which is understandable, since, alas, the notion we only use 10 percent of our grey matter seems to be merely wishful thinking, and it might be somewhat rash to remove any of it even if we do need more trees.
In fact, scans show there's something going on in all parts of our brains all the time. Although exactly what our skull cabbages are doing with all that neuron activity seems to be open to conjecture. Studies suggest that much of this activity is simply to keep us wrapped up in our little bubbles of here and now and projecting our own wee worlds of being.
And if, as has been proposed, our head veg are really just entanglements of mind-bogglingly small pieces of string then things are likely to be whole lot weirder than they seem - which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your point of view.
However, this is not the time and space to go traipsing around other dimensions, so let's stay in the familiar four we share for thereby hangs a tale.
