Rob Crossan

Make teenage summer jobs compulsory

I’m of an age where a summer’s evening often means a few gin and tonics on my balcony along with cheese, olives and an Etta James soundtrack. But it wasn’t that long ago that the slow descent of the amber orb meant trekking into Chester city centre to catch a minibus that would take me

Bring back the milkman!

Even if you couldn’t care a fig for sustainability, it’s hard not to be impressed with the Nostradamus-esque foresight of the milk float. In an era when Old King Coal ruled the roost and recycling meant pedalling backwards on your Raleigh Grifter, the pre-dawn hour across the UK was the stage for a phalanx of

Fat people are being fed lies

Every afternoon, I witness the unedifying spectacle of teenagers waddling out of the comprehensive school on my street in south London. Many of the 14- and 15-year-olds appear to weigh the same as their age. Few manage to make it past the chicken shop without buying a box of deep-fried nuggets to share between them.

The shoplifters are winning

It was when I saw an entire crate of orange juice exit my local supermarket that I knew something had died. The Artful Dodger school of shoplifting has officially been boarded up, its artisan poachers and pilferers as redundant to the modern world of thieving as swag bags, eye masks and soft sole shoes.  There’s

How to save Britain’s pubs

In Bradford a few weeks ago, I popped into a pub called Jacobs Well. It’s a squat old building, all but submerged behind the stultifyingly ugly road that grinds around the edges of the town centre. The Well was fairly quiet on a Monday night, but everyone there was congregated around the bar and it

Walking in the footsteps of the Kray twins

A Sunday morning in Bethnal Green and Adam, who has been leading Kray-themed walking tours of the neighbourhood for almost two decades, corrals a congregation of eight polite, reserved, attentive customers who, with sensible rucksacks, floor-length M&S skirts, reusable water bottles and neutral-coloured, thin-laced trainers, look as far removed from pool hall brawls and basement

Love is blind? The truth about dating with a disability

Dimly lit bars are great first-date venues for most people: the seductive ambience, the candles, the gentle clink of a martini shaker. But they couldn’t be worse for a visually impaired dater such as myself. I was born with ocular albinism and nystagmus, which renders me blind in one eye and severely partially sighted in

The unpalatable truth about British food

Last year a friend who lives in Lyon came to visit me in London. It was only her second trip to the UK and she was determined to venture deep into our indigenous food culture. ‘So, where can I get good fish and chips?’ she asked me. Now, if I was a citizen of Vienna

What’s your Christmas Eve pub tribe?

Come on in, take a seat, drink deep by the roaring hearth and don’t worry about the time – there’s bound to be a lock-in. Such is the Christmas Eve pub scenario of our fantasies. It’s been a long trek back to our home town, most likely thanks to a ‘cow on the line’ or

A middle-aged man’s guide to ageing gracefully

Middle-aged men might be feeling persecuted at the moment. But we bring so much of the opprobrium upon ourselves. The MasterChef host Gregg Wallace has, it should be remembered, not been charged with any crime. But the allegations of his inappropriate, predatory and downright cringe-worthy behaviour towards women have inspired the kind of reaction among

Below the belt: the indelicate truth about male grooming

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear. I’m British, divorced, ginger-haired and I once accidentally called the late Radio 1 DJ Annie Nightingale ‘mum’ during an interview. So there’s very little I can learn about embarrassment. Or so I thought. My perspective changed somewhere around the moment that a male groomer versed in the nascent trend