It's More Than Academic

I cannot tell you my dismay at discovering that my recently-rediscovered friend, Professor Julian Syngen-Smythe, has been the subject of a vitriolic attack by a fellow academic via the pages of his blog.

Not content with perpetuating a bitter feud that has graced a number of historical journals, Dr Reginal Wabb-Nesperton appears to have spilled his venom onto Julian's new foray into the internet.

Personally, I find such bitterness distasteful. Not for me the internecine hatreds that academia seems to go in for so frequently.

Yet I cannot stand on the sidelines and watch someone of Julian's character be dragged through a pool of vomitic smirch. So let me be the first to defend him. There will be some, I am sure (gossips, scandal-mongers and fishwives, the lot of them!) who will point to those halycon days that Julian and I spent at the Amsterdam Festival of Rubberwear back in the 70's as evidence, somehow, that I am biased. I quite forget, now, how we both happened to be there. He, I think, was researching an article on Sexual Fetish Through the Ages for one of those glossy, top-shelf magazines that were around in those days. You know the sort - slightly out of focus shot of a maiden bathing herself in a river. For my part, I had been asked to cover the emergence of sexual rubberwear manufacturing as a major employer of ex-cotton workers in the Colne Valley for the Burnley Times. Just because we spent many an hour comparing notes on the internal architecture of a number of brown cafes does not mean I have compromised my integrity.

All that is really neither here nor there, however. I merely wanted to use my new platform here on these pages to lend my support to Julian. And to rubbish Wabb-Nesperton, who is a second-rate purveyor of popularised history in the Sunday supplements and who is distinguished at the moment by not having a single reference to his work on Google. That very fact, it has to be acknowledged, speaks volumes!