Driving home for Christmas to a thousand memories... to where precious feelings reside

CHRIS Rea rasping Driving Home For Christmas, his distinct, lived-in North East English larynx constructed entirely from gravel and leftover columns of Giant's Causeway basalt, summons emotions that invade every nook and cranny of your being.

- ROY CURTIS

Other than it being a cracking singalong number, it sits on the Mount Rushmore of beloved festive tunes for one shining reason.

Rea touches eloquently on a universal theme of the season: The tingle of anticipation that precedes reuniting with loved ones after a too-long absence.

Going home, drawn by an irresistible gravitational pull to the land of your fathers, an elemental desire encapsulated in the old crooner's ravenous thirst to "get my feet on holy ground".

One of my closest friends, a lad who ordinarily walks through life flourishing the unpinned grenade of his world-weary cynicism, a fella no more in touch with his emotions than Star Trek's Spock, has been drinking from a well of happy anticipation for weeks.

After 27 months in Australia, his boy is coming home.

Our group of friends is of an age that is more Antiques Roadshow than Late Late Toy Show.

Yet, as if by magic, one of the creaking old tenements on our venerable human terrace has been transformed into a pristine new-build.

By some familial rush in the blood. He is hardly alone.

Over the next fortnight, bland news bulletins will be sauced with full-flavoured footage from Dublin and Shannon Airports of emigrants returning for Christmas.

Homecomings as a chicken soup for those sniffling and shivering through a chill of absence.

The joy on the face of a mother throwing herself into the arms of the son or daughter she has fretted about since the moment they waved goodbye at the departure gate months or years earlier is the very purest form of love.

WORLD

Unconditional and absolute and life affirming.

Her child (no matter that the son or daughter is 27 or 33 or 40 and a rocket scientist, the cloak of protective devotion in which a mother envelops her brood means it is always her "child") is home and the world is again spinning on its proper axis.