Clermont-Ferrand appears to be a city of music, on Saturdays anyway. In the Cathedral of Notre Dame de l’Assomption, a group led by a woman wearing a summer dress, rehearse for an event of some kind. She begins singing and her contralto voice, helped by the PA, echoes through the stone vaults. She swings one of her arms rhythmically, mustering her accompaniest to keep time. The way school music teachers keep reluctant students in line. I half suspect she may also be a teacher, when she isn’t performing in gothic cathedrals.
She stops for a moment and the echo of her voice decays softly into the shadows. She speaks to the group in front of her about something, away from the microphone. Then;
“On y va!”
And she begins singing again. A tour group enter from the side door and, confused by the lilting voice of the singer, stop at the front to watch her. We are all secretly thrilled by the unexpected live performance.
Behind the singer, to one side of the altar a priest wearing the kind of headset preferred by theatre stage-managers stands with another woman, this one in jeans and a tee shirt. They stare intently at some piece of equipement on the floor, having a discussion only they can hear. It’s exactly the kind of thing roadies can be seen doing before gigs, in more secular settings around the world. In another life perhaps that would have been the priest’s calling.
Leaving the cool cathedral, in the adjacent square, there appears to be a festival for ham, and associated pork products, getting ready to open. The jarring juxtaposition is heightened by a brass ensemble playing unique cover versions of popular songs. Stopping for coffee, we pick a table with decent shade at a place called The Magma Cafe. The pyroclastic theme is understandable for a city built in a volcanic basin. We order, and sit enjoying the morning heat. The coffee arrives and I begin to feel alert again. At about this point we realise the brass band is covering Killing in the Name Of, including full vocal in French. This seems to be a step too far for the cathedral wardens who pull the doors shut, leaving tourists outside to wonder if the cathedral is open.
It is, for September, unseasonably warm in many parts of France. The French weather service has issued a heatwave warning for many areas in the South East, with temperatures expected to reach 39.5°C (104°F) around Perpignan. This follows a summer of record breaking wildfires, which came on the heels of record breaking floods at the start of the year. Will it be enough to herald the kind of change needed by politicians in Europe? Only time will tell.
A lot of buildings in the older part of Clermont-Ferrand are made with the same black volcanic stone as the cathedral. It makes them look sooty, like relics from the era when coal fires and diesel fumes coated whole cities with layers of black carbon. But this is the stone’s natural colour. Reminding me of the architecture of Edinburgh, and the volcanic basalt used in buildings there.
I sit drinking coffee and feeling self conscious about my jeans. I bought them months ago, and they are too long for me. I intended to take them up, but other things kept taking priority, so instead I just started wearing them as they are. Lying to myself that long flared jeans are stylish. They lost any stylishness they had as I walked the hems to a tattered and holey mess. My self-consciousness is made worse knowing this is France. A culture that, generally speaking, knows how to dress well. Apologies for the gross generalisation. I decide to find a haberdashery supplier, and affect repairs to my jeans. As soon as coffee is finished. It takes about five seconds for me to forget this plan, when I find out there is also a multilingual bookstore in town. I often plan trips based on the bookshops in a given place and have been to bookstores across Europe and the United States. A note to civic leaders everywhere, supporting bookstores to open, and stay open, in your towns and cities also brings in visitors.
One of these days I will write about the bookshop and libraries that started my love of books, but that is for another post. Emma’s Bookshop in Clermont-Ferrand is next to the cathedral, as luck has it, about two minutes walk from The Magma Cafe.
I should make it clear, given the title of this post, that as far as I can tell, Emma’s bookshop is not specifically a queer or lgbt bookshop. It has a broad but well curated selection of subjects, including feminist texts and a children’s section. They also do teas, coffee, and cakes, and had I planned things better, I would have spent more time there than I was able to. Despite it being a flying visit, I couldn’t resist their queer titles entirely. Also in spite of being told off that I don’t apparently have enough space in my motorcycle’s top box for books – I do, there is always a way to make space for books.
I bought a hardback copy of AJ West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World. It fills me with joy and energy when I encounter Queer history texts. Our history is a fragile and delicate thing, it deserves to be treasured and recorded but is so often lost. A.J. West has done justice to his subject collecting these accounts of important LGBTQ+ spaces together. They are inevitably stories of survival against the odds, and of loss. It is sometimes heartbreaking to read about the disappearance of spaces that would have represented safety, connection, activism and liberation, for the communities they served. Communities that are almost continuously under hostile scrutiny for one perceived transgression or another.
To underline this, and tie the past to the present, one of the stories recounted in the book is that of Shakespeare and Company, as it existed in Paris, between 1919-1941.
Describing the proprietors Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, both of who were lesbians, witnessing the arrival of the Nazis in Paris;
“They knew the threat the Germans posed to books and to citizens who didn’t fit with Nazi ideology. After all, Hitler’s thugs had begun their tempest of literary immolation on the 6th of May 1933 with the ransacking and burning of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) in Berlin… The Sturmabteiling could hardly get there quickly enough. It systematically confiscated thousands of books and documents from the Institute’s library and archive, burning them days later in a huge pyre. As many as 25,000 of the Institute’s books, many containing unmatched insights into transgender history and medicine were immolated in the Bebelplatz.”
The parrallels with today’s attacks on science, and the ongoing attempt by government to remove transgender people from public life in the USA and the UK, seem obvious. On the same day I was lucky enough to visit Emma’s bookshop, the UK’s new far right blackshirt thugs were disrupting traffic into the port of Dover.
Emma’s Bookstore can be found at 9 rue Phillipe Marcombes, Clermont-Ferrand.
For anyone wondering, I also visited a haberdashers and am now making my jeans more presentable, one stitch at a time.
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