James’ Shamelessly Nostalgic A-Z Of Albums That He Liked To Listen To When He Was Younger – Part 20: Twelve Stops and Home

It’s finally time for ‘T’. But not necessarily time for tea as I’m more of a coffee drinker by trade. But do feel free to have a warm beverage of your choice.

T is for Twelve Stops and Home

I don’t know if I could describe myself as a fan of Horsham alumni The Feeling. I’ve no idea what they’ve been up to since they released their debut album in 2006 and a quick Google search would suggest that I’m not alone in that regard.

Of their five studio albums to date, only Twelve Stops and Home appears to have made a dent in the charts, but it did make quite a dent in the summer of 2006.

Which matters because that was the summer that Mrs Proclaims found ourselves living 200 or so miles apart having both moved back to the UK from Paris to briefly reside with our respective families while we worked out what to do with the rest of our lives. Having only got together in the April of that year, it was something of a make or break summer for our relationship, but fortunately for us (and in a broader sense for Little Proclaims) we made it. Although we spent most of that summer apart, all I can really remember are the times we met up, which we did so partly through visiting each other’s homesteads of course, but also by meeting up in London, Bath and Manchester (the former two were mainly about fun, the latter as a partially practical exercise due to the fact that Mrs Proclaims was shortly due to relocate there to complete a Masters degree and, unbeknownst to me at the time, so was I, just to be close to her because I’m nothing if not a romantic at heart. Although our time in Manchester, as I’ve written about many times on this blog, was not a particularly beloved period of our lives, that weekend was actually pretty cool.)

Anyway, while I’m sure that summer was fraught with anxiety and uncertainty (I was unsuccessfully job-hunting for most of it), I can only look back on it now with rose-tinted glasses and regard it very much as our ‘summer of love’. Such summers deserve a soundtrack, and, whether it deserves to be or not, Twelve Stops and Home was that for us.

And the track that brings the most nostalgia would have to be the rather appropriately titled Never be Lonely.