This week’s column is brought to you by Chris Rea’s Driving Home for Christmas. In fact, the whole piece might be more enjoyable if you just pop the song on in the background while you’re reading – there’s a nice live version on YouTube. Or you could just sing it merrily in your head. If you haven’t heard it before, try singing the words "driving home for Christmas, with a thousand memories" to whatever tune you like, and you’ll get the idea. Then YouTube it when you get a chance, because it’s brilliant and probably the most mellow Christmas song in the world. Hear it and see snowflakes.

My life at the moment involves a lot of coffee, partly due to end-of-term stress but mainly because I’ve only just taught myself to like it black. This is a revelation; now I can make it in my room without having to go to the kitchen to get milk. Even better, I can sit alone in steamy cafés drinking a neat little grown-up Americano, talking on my mobile to distant, glamorous girlfriends, saying things like, "Uh huh. Uh huh. Oh, darling, I know."

Not that I actually do this. More often than not I just sit in Starbucks with one of their inappropriately ginormous ‘Venti’ mugs of black coffee – the kind you have to hold with both hands, so you feel like a child – listening to the endless loop of their Christmas playlist. This is how I have come to love the work of Chris Rea (and several different dodgy covers of ‘White Christmas’). It’s also how I’ve come to think a lot about going home, which is always another comforting but disorientating experience that makes you feel like a child again.

The idea of going home has become totally distorted as it’s been swept up into reality TV show rhetoric. When a reality show contestant is evicted, or eliminated, or has received the lowest number of votes and so will not be proceeding in the competition – however dramatically the producers want to phrase it – they accept, with weary resignation, that they are going home.

It’s the familiar cry of the post-sing-off X Factor star, who wails plaintively in next week’s introduction video that she is "just not ready to go home yet; I’m having such an amazing time". Going home is admitting defeat.

Even Strictly Come Dancing contestants, who actually stay at home during their stint on the show and commute into their sparkly BBC wonderland each weekend, talk about "going home" to mean being voted off the programme.

It turns the idea of "home" into an abstract, rubbishy consolation prize, something mundane and dreary and everyday compared to the primetime showbiz adventure they’ve embarked on as a sort of holiday. It’s a poor alternative to dancing around under the studio lights, covered in fake tan and glitter, while a benevolent Bruce Forsyth looks on.

Meanwhile, for the celebrities on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, "home" has by this point in the show become a golden memory – a place of almost mythical comfort and delight. Though, really, so has anywhere you can so much as sit down without someone tipping a bucketful of cockroaches down your shirt.

So which is a term at Cambridge? Glitter and dancing, or a nest of Australian Jumping Spiders? Really, driving home for Christmas is a mixture of extremes: a break from the excitement, some respite from the pressure of the studio lights, and finally being able to sleep somewhere that isn’t a hammock filled with snakes. For some of us it’s claustrophobic; for others it’s a chance to breathe. But at least Chris Rea got it right about the thousand memories.