So, Christmas is over, you’ve eaten your fill of turkey, mince pies and sprouts and you’re looking to the new year.

Whether through excessive over-indulgence, a real desire to change or pressure to rid yourself of bad habits, January 1 is often seen as a great opportunity to make a fresh start.

But with the most common resolutions relating to finances, weight loss and quitting smoking, most people give up even trying within a matter of weeks.

So, avoiding these common choices and in the spirit of this festive period, I had a think about some things that Haringey could do come January 1 2008.

Here’s what I came up with:

1. Ditch plans for the Hornsey and Tottenham Town Hall redevelopments and build multi-storey car parks on the land instead. The current plans are expensive, time consuming and in part controversial; and surely Haringey would benefit from more parking spaces to avoid the dreaded spread of CPZs.

2. Charge small Smart and electric cars an excess for parking permits. They are ugly. They deserve to pay a penalty for ruining the environment by being aesthetically unappealing.

3. Ditch plans for six super health centres/ polyclinics for the borough and use the funds to reinstate Fortis Green Clinic and Hornsey Central Hospital instead. It’s as simple as that. Why is it so difficult to understand?

4. Stop any process of selling the lease for Ally Pally and get someone rich like Roman Abramovitch or Richard Branson to buy it and pay for its upkeep while giving it as a gift to the community.

5. Turn the council offices into homes for the thousands of people on the borough’s housing register and have them all move in until the people that can do something realise what a distaster the situation in Haringey really is.

6. Knock down Hornsey’s New River Village and build something made of better material than cardboard without the danger of flooding so people can live in even semi-human conditions.

7. Ban applications for betting shops in Green Lanes. Divert them to Muswell Hill instead.

8. Turn Haringey into one whole one way street with a 20 mph speed limit including humps, lumps, bumps and roundabouts at 10 metre intervals. Actually this is already happening.

Well as some wise man said: “A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.”

Happy new year and good luck with your resolutions.