Tree

 Tradition

Engineering

Carbon footprint

Strategic drift

Business management

This weekend, I decorated my Christmas tree with my son. They commented on the age of the tree, which is twice his age, and how he preferred the warm glow of the ‘old-fashioned’ lights. I wasn’t offended. I’m very proud of my tree. It is said That an artificial tree needs to be at least 10 years old to have a smaller carbon footprint than a real tree. Mine is 30. And while I love the tree renting options, where Trees are adopted each year at Christmas and then returned until they are retired at 7 feet tall back to the forest of their origins, These weren’t an option at the end of the last century, which is when I bought my tree, and the lights.

Each year I unfold the trees branches, and I admire the engineering, as each node has an individual hinge.  We untangle the lights and I comment on their terrible design. And I caught my mind back to studying electronics at college as part of my university certificate in technological physics. Each year we add the home-made decorations, that my son, and sometimes I, have made over the years. Every year, my angel refuses to sit peacefully at the top, Instead, repeatedly falling into the ground. My son calls her the fallen angel. Then this reminds me of our own tree as I grew up, With its fairy, Who, my parents explained, had a drinking problem, Which is why she, too, would fall repeatedly from the tree. So much history combined today as I wrapped presents and placed them under the tree reusing wrapping paper from years before, Using stationery For my mother‘s time making it well over 10 years old. And finding, by chance, the home address of the original Torill after whom I am named.

As I fold away the box the tree came in I am reminded of my studies at Nottingham Trent University. Of strategic drift and how true that is as business after business has itself folded on our High Streets. My box is from Woolworths, A business that failed after very nearly 100 years. More recently, I had something of a refresher in risk management With open learn, A free course from the open university. The same university that my mother gained her degree from over six years of study well holding down a job and running a house, which was so much harder to run than my own, With a two hour commute to work each way and holding the student association meetings at a station café halfway home. Of the convoluted bus journeys would take together so she could attend lectures tutorials. Before digital devices we would stand on cold and windy corners with nothing but faith in the next bus finally arriving to connect to many buses between home and wherever she needed to travel to next for her studies.

I am reminded of journeys undertaken. for many journeys to places of safety from places of oppression. And journeys in life in Pursuit of education, and the tapestry of our careers. How, this is all the stuff of life and not an alternative to it.