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[title]It’s all very well making the same old new year’s resolutions every January to try and drink, smoke and masturbate a tiny bit less if we possibly can. But what if London herself made a list of resolutions? That would be far more interesting. I assume it would look something like this:
1. I resolve to be easier to get into and out of at peak times.
2. I will try to give up hipsters.
3. I will swallow Belgravia whole, oligarch ‘iceberg’ mansions and all, and belch it out again as fresh green virgin land on which to build affordable housing for local people, starting with core workers, students and creative people and stopping well before we get to lawyers.
4. I resolve to name and shame the owner of every single incontinent hound that craps on my face this year.
5. I will stop trying to open New York-style bars, clubs and restaurants and endeavour to be myself.
6. I promise to elect a mayor in 2016 who is an actual local politician in his or her prime. So not a defunct militant Labour dinosaur off ‘Have I Got News for You?’, or a right-wing Tory demagogue off ‘Have I Got News for You?’. And certainly not a defunct Labour dinosaur off a late-night politics programme the name of which I can’t even remember, who shuts her eyes when she speaks as if she thinks she is directly receiving and communicating the actual voice of God (that’s you I’m talking about, Diane Abbott, in case you’ve got your eyes closed and you missed the reference).
7. I will redevelop my dilapidated inner urban wastelands and not spread into the green belt (as is being seriously proposed) just to keep some evil property developer in coke and prostitutes.
8. When I am in the middle of a really bad cold in January I promise I will sneeze so hard that The Shard gets blown to the moon and people can see St Paul’s again.
9. I will make sure that by the end of the year all my buses are those new Routemasters with the sexy platform on the back which give everyone such a great sense of the good old days coming back again, and that every last one-man-operated bus will have been melted down to make mobile phones for the poor.
10. I resolve to retrain all my traffic wardens as actual policemen so that the people in uniform walking up and down our streets all day are doing so for the safety and wellbeing of the community, not just to prevent hardworking people from stopping outside the shops for two minutes to get tea for their children. If all the stupid, silent, cynical wardens were actually honest old-fashioned coppers, imagine – just imagine – how safe you would feel.
11. I resolve to turn my lights off at night to keep energy bills down, minimise carbon emissions, reintroduce a bit of romance to the concept of ‘night’ and give the birds a break – they haven’t slept since 1951.
12. I will try and entice a whale to swim up the Thames all the way to Westminster again. That was brilliant, that was. Although this time I will let it out again before it dies.
13. I resolve to turn all my small independent cinemas back into cinemas. It’s not like we need all those supermarkets anyway: everybody shops online these days.
14. I will conspire in some dastardly way as yet undreamt of to ensure that Queen’s Park Rangers remain in the Premier League.
15. I resolve to put the curtains back on pub windows. It was much cosier.
16. Ditto betting shops.
Resolutely disagree? Tweet him @gilescoren