“WE hate Oxford and we hate Oxford, we hate Oxford and we hate Oxford, we hate Oxford and we hate Oxford; we are the Oxford haters.”

Even as football chants go, it’s not one of the cleverest, but that hasn’t stopped generations of Swindon Town fans singing along to it at every home match for the last 50 years.

‘Hate’ was a banned word in our house when our kids were growing up, as no matter how much they said they hated homework, shopping or even Oxford United, it never even came close to real hatred as the dictionary defines it.

Hatred is something you reserve for evil people and the really horrible things that happen to you.

Besides, I never could work out why Town fans hated them so much when Oxford have clearly always been an inferior club in every way and have hardly ever won a game against us.

Don’t hate. Pity.

And it can’t have had anything to do with the city of Oxford, either, because — let’s face it — we are lucky to have such a nice place down the road, which we can visit any time we want, and see all those dreaming spires and drink in the same pubs as Morse.

But there is a perfectly good reason for some Swindon folk hating Oxford, and it’s if you are sent there on a course of radiotherapy.

For a start you have a right to curse your luck if you are in the one in three people who are diagnosed with cancer.

And if drawing the short straw isn’t bad enough, you have to go through all that being prodded and poked and the unpleasant treatment they give you in Swindon. Then, just when you think it can’t get any worse, it often does.

They tell you – in case you didn’t already know – that you have to travel to Oxford for radiotherapy, along what is surely the most inadequate and frustrating major road between two cities in the whole of Britain.

Swindon, as we know, is a city in all but name, and would have been one ages ago if it wasn’t lacking the three things that a city is supposed to have, which is a university, a cathedral and its own radiotherapy unit.

What I didn’t realise until last Thursday, when I attended the official launch of the Brighter Futures Radiotherapy Appeal at the Great Western Hospital, was that those people sent to Oxford for their treatment have to make the journey not once, not twice, but on average 40 times.

And when they complete this two-hour round trip — that’s two hours on a good day — each time it will have been for treatment lasting just two minutes.

Some of those people will wake up each day not really wanting to lift their heads off their pillows, let alone drag themselves along the A420.

So if anybody should be singing songs about hating Oxford, it’s them.

If you haven’t already heard about the appeal to correct this crazy state of affairs and open a radiotherapy unit in Swindon, you soon will.

One way they have devised to raise money is a sponsored bike ride on September 20 – with a choice of three routes, one being 70 miles, the same distance radiotherapy patients travel to Oxford and back.

If my creaking body is up to it, I’ll be on it.

You are going to hear a lot about the appeal because it has to raise £2.9million, and that is an awful lot of money.

Or, to put it another way: enough to buy Oxford United and have £2.8million left over.