Michael Moynihan: Home is where the heart is — especially this Christmas

I had an abstract idea that Christmas existed beyond the county bounds, but how would it measure up?

A busy English Market in Cork city yesterday as people get ready for the Christmas holidays. Picture: Dan Linehan

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep.

Dylan Thomas was not referring to Cork when he wrote the lines above — the title, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ — tells you immediately that his focus was a couple of hundred miles to the east.