EVERY city has an issue or two which divides its people and refuses to go away. For some, like Liverpool, it’s football.

For others, Belfast being the most dramatic example, it’s religion. For a few special places – Glasgow springs to mind – it’s football AND religion.

For us it’s students, or to use that charmingly antiquated expression ‘town v gown’.

Oxford being a sedate kind of place, this rarely manifests itself in anything more than a bit of tutting, or, in extreme cases, a strongly-worded letter to this newspaper. But it’s never far from the surface.

The depth of feeling on the matter came home to me over the weekend, when a friend, not long ago a student themselves, launched into a full-scale attack on the legions of freshers clogging Cowley Road.

The worst offences seem to be dawdling, being stupidly drunk (the insinuation being that ‘normal’ drunk is fine) and generally being annoying. The chestnuts of braying poshos with red trousers (male) and stupid names (female) was also raised.

Interestingly Brookes’ students are deemed far more irritating than those from its more venerable counterpart down the hill (cars, rowdiness, poor neighbourliness and a preponderance of those entitled and supremely confident types, known as ‘Rahs’, are the main gripes).

Yet, even more tellingly, students from both universities are considered models of Victorian manners when compared with the influx of young people they have just replaced – foreign teenagers on summer English courses.

I sympathise to a point. By the end of August, even the most open-minded internationalist is surely cursing under their breath at being run off the pavement by brightly-clad summer school pupils walking four-abreast and yelling at each other in any one of the Latin tongues.

For the good folk living near South Park, who have to put up with boozy alfresco parties, the annoyance must be off the scale.

But here’s the thing: without students Oxford is a poorer place. More than that, it’s a bit rubbish. Students, in whatever season, lend it colour, life and vibrancy. They allow us to retain world-class cultural venues and mean venues like the O2 Academy can punch above their weight attracting top artists.

Without students we would just be another medium-sized provincial town. Like Slough or Swindon. And that’s not even talking about the money they bring in.

So let’s embrace our students, shall we? Perhaps not literally though.