Rob Crossan

There are few things that look sadder than an abandoned football ground. I spent longer than I meant to sitting on a decaying bench looking out over the forest that was once the intended playing surface for the Stroitel Pripyat football club. The sky above was cerulean, cloudless and entirely still. The only life came from my hand-held Geiger counter which spluttered and crackled, telling me that

Beulah Hill in Norwood is an overwhelmingly uninteresting stretch of South London road; the kind of anonymous thoroughfare that can induce mild depression on a day of drizzle and delayed buses.   Yet, as is often the way with these tedious parts of suburbia, visual perseverance can reap rewards. It was only last week, on my hundredth trudge down the hill towards

I’ve long held firm to the adage that you can’t truly call yourself a local in the town, city or village you reside in until you’ve spent over half your life there.  By my own calculation, I’ve just tipped over into becoming a Londoner: as of this year, I have spent 24 of my 47 years in the capital.   Not only that, but I’m marrying into the clan too. My fiancée – whom I’ll be tying the knot with in the

I’ve long clung hold of one small crumb of comfort from my encroaching blindness. Namely that if and when my deteriorating vision (I have albinism and nystagmus) packs up completely, I can become one of those blokes who takes his guide dog to the pub and teaches it to drink beer from an ashtray.   But I won’t be doing that at any branches of J.D. Wetherspoon as things stand. As

In a week in which embarrassing and damaging revelations about past misdemeanours are very much in vogue, let me reveal one of my own. When I was seven years old, I wrote in to Jim’ll Fix It. My request was to play a giant Wurlitzer organ, preferably the one in the Blackpool Empress Ballroom. To my retrospective

There are so many ways to mangle brilliance. If you’re a present or former member of Take That, you’ll know what I mean when it comes to taking the sweet essence of the Bee Gees and turning their hits into something as bland and devoid of colour as an Ikea Billy bookcase. And if you’re

Four decades ago, a man took lots of photos of some working-class people having a day out at the seaside. The resort was New Brighton on Merseyside, and the photos showed that the sun shone, the ice creams were runny and lots of people fell asleep in their deckchairs, resulting in their faces turning fire-engine

The biggest rebel in my year at school (a pretty raggedy state comprehensive near Chester) was a guy called Paul. He had very long hair, wore a trench coat and was regularly told to ‘have a bath’ by the more boorish elements of the playground. Paul railed against the system in the way that only teenagers

Half a century ago today, the Duke of Kent, Anthony Hopkins and 97 other diners had a meal of caviar and lobster canapés followed by grilled steak, all washed down with Dom Perignon. There was nothing too unusual about this slightly ostentatious menu, one that was a typical example of 1970s British fine dining. But it

The only time I ever saw David Bowie live was at a ropey festival in an old airfield near Stratford-upon-Avon in the latter half of the 1990s. Frankly, I thought he was pretty awful. It was the peak of Britpop, electronica and trip hop were in the ascendency and the campsite and smaller stages that

Bernard Herrmann died 50 years ago this month. He only just lived long enough to complete the suite of instrumental jazz that’s now regarded as not only his finest work across many decades as a movie composer, but one of the greatest celluloid soundtracks of all time. There are very few movies which you can

Among all the perfidies of public transport in Britain (a nation that can build a £40 billion railway based on the premise that the outskirts of Acton counts as a ‘central London’ terminus), perhaps the most ludicrous of all is this. On 26 December, a day when millions of us need to move about, no

The first thing I should tell you about my relationship with Christmas is that I’m not saturated in essence of humbug. My approach to a big family Christmas is the same as my relationship with Mexican food: if it’s put in front of me I’ll enjoy it, but I probably wouldn’t ever purposely seek it

There’s a trading estate, which might possibly need an envoy. There’s a Pizza Express, whose user ratings online are the equal to the Woking branch. And there’s also a branch of Boots which has a solid range of deodorants. Should Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor ever acknowledge any perspiration issues, desire a pepperoni or feel like taking on a

Food courts appear to be everywhere in London at the moment and, for reasons too boring to go into here, I found myself at three of them across the capital in the space of four days last week. (Yes, before you ask, I am beginning to question my life choices as a result.) Not that

Back in the early 1990s, I was a teenage visitor to an array of dilapidated Victorian cow sheds masquerading as third and fourth division football grounds as I supported my team, Wrexham FC, on their travels. There were still many pre-Hillsborough fences in place, some of which (most notably in the away end at Crewe

Like most freelance writers, I have a notepad full of jottings which come under the loose category of ‘Ideas I Probably Won’t Get Round To Doing As I Doubt Anyone Will Be Interested, They’re A Bit Rubbish Anyway And It Probably Wouldn’t Pay Much’. Around halfway down this list is a book provisionally entitled A

If Christmas is a time for giving then it seems the message isn’t getting through to nearly enough office managers. For the umpteenth year running, I’m getting the annual stream of resigned-sounding complaints from friends who have office-based careers. Office life has its perks, of course; unlike my mostly-bed-and-airport-based freelance life, you actually know what

There may well be, somewhere in this nation of ours, a long-established succession of sensitive, emotionally aware 14-year-olds who can appreciate and denounce the impact of bullying. But, honestly, none of them went to my school.  It doesn’t sound like there were many of this cadre at Dulwich College half a century ago either. At

In the mid-1990s, ecstasy was a drug of the suburbs. My friends and I, all A-level students and shortly to become beneficiaries of the final years of higher education that didn’t come with tuition fees, did not fit the model of ‘drug users’ that the media, still in thrall to 1980s heroin hyperbole, fixated on.