“Thinking cap on this should be fun”. This is the wry, unpunctuated inscription, by my younger brother Jason, in large blue ink letters, inside the front cover of his gift to me, Origami, by paper-folding supremo and illusionist, Robert Harbin.
Ah, the valley fold and the mountain fold, the water bomb base and the reverse, and all those thick, friendly-looking arrows leading, in the early pages, to delight. Then, as I worked, with teenage fanaticism, further through the book, they pointed to utter bafflement.
An adventurous bear in yellow check trousers and Robert Harbin fired my life-long love of, if not proficiency in, paper-folding, or origami (Harbin’s preferred term).
The Rupert Annuals, after WWII, featured games and other activities beside the stories of Rupert Bear, Algy, Tiger Lily, Bill, Edward and a host of other characters. The beautiful illustrations of Rupert’s stories were by Alfred Bestall. He was also a fan of paper folding and introduced designs linked to a story in the annual. By the time my brother and I began to read the annuals in the 1960s, this work had been passed to Harbin. He became the first President of the British Origami Society and produced nearly 20 books on how to make origami models. Full of enthusiasm, I collected his Origami 1-4 paperbacks.
My brother was a prophetic eight-year-old. This two-thousand-year-old activity should have been fun. The instructions looked beguilingly straightforward, but I could not progress far in any of the books without hitting an impenetrable paper wall, such as the penguin head, the fore arms of an Ornithomimus, or the entire Knight on Horseback. The simple phrase “now open out” as I fumbled with what had seemed such promising, densely folded layers would make me silently roar with frustration and return to the soothing, simple predictability of the Samurai Hat and the Flapping Crane. There, my fingers knew the way, from flat square to three-dimensional creation, without my even looking.
As an adult, I would occasionally revive my rudimentary folding and another childhood fascination – string games. Neither need translation and proved to be surprisingly useful on long journeys abroad. My last string game performance was creating a multi-form sequence to illustrate the roles of a communications team. My hands and fingers automatically performed every stage, as though the decades since I learned the moves vanished under the wave of a wand. The sight of my colleagues’ open mouths gave me an inkling of the response a magician elicits.
In lockdown, I trawled the internet for opportunities to learn and to take part in activities. I found science communicator Dr Lizzie Burns. She had been working with patients and staff at Oxford University Hospitals, providing “calm and focus for wellbeing through origami”. Supported by extra funding, these sessions had expanded to spanning the world through YouTube. With trepidation, I dusted off my packet of origami paper.
Dr Burns’ soft, friendly voice and reassuring manner boded well and her commitment to never using origami terms – farewell “crimp first” and “squash fold”! – put up swags of imaginary bunting around me. And when she took out a sheet of A4, from which to create a square, and she tore off, rather than cut with precision, the by-product rectangle, I knew at once that all would be well. Her soothing guidance – hardly instructions at all – carried me effortlessly to a tulip which stands, unsupported, on a table, a hare that actually looks like a hare, a chicken that even lays an egg. That voice and steady, clear movements soothed and encouraged like no other, ensuring all her pupils focused entirely on this discrete magic of two dimensions into three. All concerns were set aside for this enchanting hour.
Finally, the maddening directions from my old paperbacks make sense. The nemeses have become peaceful, restorative friends and, as once predicted, fun.