You Spin Me Right Round

Every time we get in the van to do our Brit-clichés (au marché, au boulangerie, au bar) we turn the car radio on, and it’s Radio Sud, 102,5.

Every day, whatever the hour, it’s a disco party.

Not house or club.

Actual disco.

And, we agree, very gay. Some power ballads. But mostly, that familiar rhythm–

They want you, They want you, They want you as a new recruit

You spin me right round baby, right round

We belt along to songs from the cheesiest of nights out gone by, camp it up. K is a better old queen than I am, always is. I’m too fucking serious, for all my whimsy.

After 4 weeks of woodlands, burnout finally done with,

‘We should go there’.

‘Yeah. If this is their local radio, the town must be fun, eh?’

‘And old’.

‘Haha, we’ll fit right in’.

‘Yeah, won’t feel awkward’.

‘Maybe a vibe like Sitges?’

‘Or the oldies bits of Brighton?’

‘Yeah: It’ll be fun!’

I think fondly about Troy Ford, imagine taking an apéro sans alco with him while we listen to hits from Radio Sud.

Mate une dernière fois mon derriére

Y me solté el cabello, me vesti da reina

We decide to go Thursday; Friday could be overheated, Saturday a definite no-no. Thursdays are usually good.

Arrival in the early evening heat to a central square surrounded by the now-familiar cream and brick-red palette, a river, the streets small and dark. The buildings are tall, old, and wildly narrow. Balconies here are reduced to windowsills - but no geraniums. Facades are cracking, blistered, fading.

On a patch of green, young people are sparring– gloves and pads thud and squeak.

‘A town full of fit lesbians’ we joke, as we are nearly mowed down by the third hard-bodied woman with tattoos and an undercut, zooming past, head down. We have not seen women like this in our quiet corner of France, where gender presentation is so binarised, and where women are so femmed up, that we routinely get greeted in cafes as M’sieur-Dame, euh, pardon, Mesdames. (We always laugh about it and fight afterwards about who was the one who was taken to be M’sieur. Nobody wants to be Madame ffs).

All along the river, people of all ages are cycling, running. We see a woman on inline skates going up the precipitous cobblestone hill–

‘Jesus, see that?’

‘I knooooow!’

We are seafront quad skaters in our own UK home town, slower and steadier each year. We know what effort and skill this woman is using: a fucking shedload.

We realise what we hadn’t known (as monument-dodgers, we swerve from guidebooks): this is a university town. The bars are crowded with young people (young people smoking! Another unexpected). The presence all around the square’s bars of people dressed in the global attire of intellectuals (posh brands, mildly boho) makes sense now. Professeurs everywhere.

Mi Amore, Espresso Macchiato, Macchiato, Macchiato, Per Favore

Alors Je Sens Dans Moi Mon Coeur Qui Bat

We take our tapas, our apéro (it’s both, in this southern borderland). I look up, up, up, at the cobblestone hill and the towering thin houses.

‘It’s a bit like Amsterdam’, I say.

It’s nothing like Amsterdam, of course; a waterway lined with tall skinny buildings, an abundance of tall, strong women, and a bunch of bicycles, do not make a Gallic Amsterdam. This is the sort of lazy thing we all fall into when we travel, and it’s why people think Zanzibar looks like Calicut looks like Nairobi. (Dubai had to leave the list because nothing has looked like Dubai for quite some years now).

The gay bar opens at 7; we leave going there until after 8, but are still the only clients. The universal bar-twink tells us with kindness that, even with the dog, we can go inside. But inside, there are no seats at all, and everything is painted black. This is a serious space, where transactions happen that are not ours. We can parse queer space, and there’ll be no karaoke or drag bingo here. Or lesbian cyclists.

Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight

Oui, Je Veux Mourir Sur Scene

As we walk to the van, the dog squats in the neatly trimmed grass around a mediaeval monument. Quickly, we drag them to a dingy corner by a crumbling wall; no time to reach the longer grass. An explosive gush shoots out, yellow and fluid.

‘We’re not clearing that one up‘.

‘We couldn’t’.

‘No more watermelon’.

We walk our guilt to the car park and leave, silent.

In the van, unexpected memories surface.

Paris.

Why has that come up now, here? Catches me by surprise. Sensory flashbacks:– cheap champagne, the squeaking iron cage lift in that cheap hotel, the laughing (them) and the yelling (me), that cheap ivory bar soap, liquefaction of the gut from fear, the heated squeeze of shame.

They want you, They want you, They want you as a new recruit

You spin me right round baby, right round

Back in the van, going home from the apéro outing, I tell K that this memory is resurfacing (which it never did, never does, it’s processed, long since dealt with, away. It’s very weird to be thinking about it. Last time it came out was when I deliberately brushed it off and offered it up, in a quick factual anecdote mode, for my students, during the Me Too moment, when they were collecting stories).

That was in another country,

And besides, the wench is dead.

I ask K how the town made them feel. Tell what it’s raised in me, remind K that it’s ok, I’m not in any kind of trauma space. I’m just very curious about how the town made me feel and why on earth it raised ancient traces.

It’s raining men!

Think I’d lay down and die? No, no, not I, I will survive!

K speaks, as always, quietly– with care, with thought.

‘I feel the same, I don’t want to go back. It’s something like when we went to Ireland?’

‘Yes! Exactly that feeling. Something violent in the history? Something about suffering and misery right in that exact place?’

‘Yeah, the air was sort of– heavy. I imagine there must be places in Scotland that would feel the same?’

‘God yeah, the site of the Battle of Culloden, you can feel something there. But even in some random small places around Scotland, you know?’

‘Yeah, like when we were in Ireland. Exactly. I felt it too, here. Weird’.

‘So weird! All those young people, the students, the bikes and the runners– all that activity and life?’

K pauses.

‘It was a facade’.

‘Yes! Or a pushback, a fight, something sort of desperate about all that activity? Like, so much of it? I’m so glad you felt it too, wasn’t just me’.

What I’d rationalised - while drinking beer and eating spice - as a heavy feeling born from the heat, from spring pollen, the languor of a river town, or the extreme chill of a southern border area vibe, was not any of that: we felt-knew it.

How? What?

We don’t know.

J’ai du faire un mauvais rêve

Pour essuyer le temps qui blesse, un peu de love et de tendresse

In academia, we are very careful to distinguish between a feeling, a mood, an emotion, and affect. This particular moment was touched by affect. Social, in the body, pre-conscious. Gabriel Tarde, Lisa Blackman: they understood something of it, and grew my own understanding. I can think-feel and recognise it.

Affect transmits across and between bodies, it doesn’t arrive in a single body.

And if it transmits across time?

(I recommend Qobuz, and a nasty break-up with Spotify)

In The Navy Village People

You Spin Me Round Pete Burns

Tous les Memes Stromae

Todos Mi Miran Gloria Trevi

Espresso Machiato MERXXY Flow

La Vie en Rose Alice et Moi

Man After Midnight Abba

Mourir sur Scene Dalida

Raining Men Weather Girls

I Will Survive Gloria Gaynor

Mauvais Reve Hoshi

Love’n’Tendresse Eddy de Pretto

I am sorry sorry desolé (sic) about my diacritics (and maybe even some typos?)

My chromebook died shortly after arrival, I’ve had to buy a new one, but the AZERTY keyboard on the keys doesn’t correspond to what appears on the page, and most diacritics are not to be found. Yet. We persevere.