Colm O'Regan: Origami made me enjoy time with my daughter tenfold
It is the worst betrayal that any columnist can perpetrate – to encourage the reader to listen to his podcast.
This should be a safe space. I was recently introduced on the virtual stage at a comedy gig by the MC, Eve who said: “Colm has a podcast which I haven’t listened to and I probably won’t either” and it struck me as the most liberating thing anyone could say. We are nearing a time where everyone will have a podcast.
So it becomes ever more necessary to lay it out plain and simple at the start of any relationship. “I am not going to listen to your podcast.” So don’t listen to my podcast.
Pity though, because this latest episode is a humdinger. Or at least as dinged as hums can be in a podcast about mathematics. (That’s probably the only thing preventing me from tempting Spotify away from Joe Rogan. I deliberately don’t want listeners.)
For the other eighteen of you, this time I’m talking about origami. The Japanese art of paper folding. Every so often, a thought strikes me that origami looks like fun. But lots of things look like fun and I only have so much time and if you’ll excuse me I need to reply to something on my phone.
But as the children get older, time-consuming becomes a good thing. Sitting down with a five-year-old to just DO a thing for its own sake, for no performance or sharing (apart from writing about it in a national newspaper) or competition or other utility is a lovely way to consume time.
We watched a video about it. There is an ASMR kind of feeling with the folding of the paper both on Youtube and in our hands. There are the grunts of frustration as I realise I’ve made a bags of it and seek to blame my daughter somehow. And I didn’t check my phone once.
But origami is also amazing because it’s all about maths.
The hardest thing to unlearn about maths is that it has to ‘look a certain way’. That there should be numbers or equals signs, Greek letters. The big one that looks like an angry capital E. The triangles called delta. The R with the weird typeface that looks like it was designed by someone who did logos in the 80s. But maths is also about things that we would find very familiar: stacking and folding and even knots. And why not? Knotting and tying is pretty fundamental to keeping the whole show on the road.
Folding is crucial to so much of life. Someone once said: Anything that moves, folds. The folding of the time and space, DNA, an airbag, a solar sail for a satellite, a STENT! Recent stent design uses origami so that it can be put into you without making a big hole but once inside it can be unfolded like a ship in a bottle.
My guest on the podcast is Dr Rachel Quinlan from NUIG who teaches all the angry Es and weird Rs to students (very well btw. I’ve watched her online lectures) but also in her spare time folds beautiful origami tessellations out of paper. Tessellation means tiling. TILING! There is huge maths behind tiling. There are even concepts called Wallpaper Groups! If you struggle with home-decorating, it’s not a personal failure. You’re just knee deep in your phD.
- Colm’s podcast is called the Function Room so you’ll know not to accidentally listen to it.
