HELP is at hand for those readers of the new compact edition of The Times who find they cannot make a decent-sized paper hat out of it. Tests have shown that it can be formed into an excellent kangaroo.

An additional benefit of turning the commuter-friendly edition — once you have read it — into a marsupial is that the sculpture takes at least 20 minutes to create, with more than 30 folds, thus soaking up a significant segment of train delay.

A simple, traditional triangular hat, by contrast, can be knocked up in the brief interval between Covent Garden and Leicester Square.

Using a double-page spread from the tabloid edition, readers will be able to fashion themselves a passable hat that will fit over the average head. But Times readers are far from average, and the preferred yardstick is the square box headgear known as a printer’s hat, as worn by the Carpenter in Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice Through The Looking-Glass.

Mark Bolitho, 36, a London accountant, part-time origami enthusiast and author of the paper-folding guide Crease Lightning, demonstrated the relative properties of broadsheet and tabloid yesterday.

His tabloid printer’s hat would barely cover the head of a newborn baby, whereas his broadsheet creation, made to exactly the same pattern, just about covered an adult cranium.

Mr Bolitho, who taught himself origami as a child in Australia, admitted that newsprint was really too thin to be the ideal paper-folding medium. He nevertheless demonstrated its possibilities in the hands of an expert, creating a 3in-high creature complete with paper pouch. As it was made from the tabloid edition, it is properly a joey rather than a fully-grown kangaroo.

“The smaller edition is better for this — a broadsheet page would be too big,” Mr Bolitho said. “And if you make it on a crowded train, you don’t need any more room than you do to read the paper in the first place.”

Mr Bolitho designed the kangaroo for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, which was looking for gifts to distribute during a tour of Japan, where the ancient art was born and it is taken seriously. Proper origami is conducted with thicker paper which, although pretty, seriously lacks any intelligent reading.

Origami spread after the Second World War, with so many American servicemen in Japan. The apogee of the art is still regarded as the “peace crane”, a paper bird that flaps its wings. It became a popular symbol in the wake of Hiroshima.

Mr Bolitho believes his own greatest achievements to be a scorpion that he created as a child, and a mouse that he devised more recently. “I’m not really a specialist in newspaper folding,” he admitted.

The broadsheet remains the format of choice for hats: a double page can be the basis of simple but credible bishop’s mitre. The larger paper also wins hands down when it comes to creating origami with sound.

In a carefully controlled scientific test, Mr Bolitho made identical bangers from the two sizes of paper. The broadsheet banger produced a resounding crack when flicked, but on the first trial self-destructed in the process. By slowing his arm motion, Mr Bolitho managed to produce a satisfyingly thunderous noise without the device ripping itself apart.

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