Sir – I’m sick to the back teeth hearing about the Castle Mill development. In the December 11 edition of the paper, I was horrified to see the ‘Letters extra’ section, once replete with interesting letters on wider issues of human rights, homelessness and climate change, full of Castle Mill letters. It’s like a mill going round and round and round ad nauseam.

I value my mental health, and so haven’t gone through every detail of the controversy surrounding the building of these flats, but personally I don’t see the problem. They are not built on Port Meadow, and I think they look fine (my aunt, who is an art historian, agrees with me).

So some view of some church is changed? So what. Sorry to break it you, but things do change. If they didn’t change there would still be a city wall, East Oxford would be full of peasants, and we’d all be dying of the plague.

We are living in a world on the brink of climate catastrophe, millions or perhaps billions of people will suffer and die as a consequence (the ones who aren’t suffering and dying already), and the best weapon we have against this self-inflicted apocalypse is education.

In this context, one of the greatest universities in the world should be allowed to provide accommodation for its students without this endless petty fussing and whingeing.

Please move on. The Castle Mill Saga is in essence a squabbling over the arrangement of cutlery in the first-class dining hall of the Titanic.

Daniel Emlyn-Jones, Oxford