It’s a little late for my Christmas wishes to come true – but there’s still time for a few New Year Here’s- Hoping suggestions for 2014.

Here’s Hoping:

• Someone changes the traffic light priorities on Millbrook Road/Mountbatten Way. Since the sequences changed the long waits have made the commute out of the city along this vital artery a nightmare for traffic leaving the city at the end of the day. Come on, chaps, admit you have it wrong and switch the lights back.

• The good people of Hampshire wake up to the fact that you cannot have it both ways over house prices in the county. No use moaning about rising prices and a lack of new homes if every application to build the things is turned down on the grounds local residents object. If you want cheaper homes that your children can afford then accept that lovely view over a green field must go.

• Those who bang on about nasty big companies making too much profit for their shareholders – energy firms, water companies, house builders – come to realise the largest shareholders are in fact the companies that provide their pensions. Low dividends means less in the pot to pay out – a simple equation.

• We understand that the vast majority of staff who work in the NHS – office staff as well as nurses and doctors – do a fabulous job under difficult circumstances. But we stop treating the NHS as a sacred cow, accept some change has to come, and play our part in ensuring money isn’t wasted – like letting clinics and hospitals know when we cannot turn up for an appointment and waiting to see a GP instead of cramming into A&E units.

• Councils stop treating motorists as pariahs, milking them of cash at every turn.

Make parking easy and cheap and welcome shoppers into city and town centres. It’s what the French do, and their town centres are thriving, with lots of individual shops and stores.

• We stop treating cyclists as either angels on bikes or the greatest scourge to hit Hampshire since the Black Death. The truth is cyclists are not saints, they have no more rights to the road as motorists and many of our highways and byways are just unsuitable for both. Having said that, cycling is far healthier than driving, can be a jolly family activity and should be encouraged – just not by the thousand, all at once, on narrow New Forest roads.

• Someone finally sees sense, and sells off a little of the £150m Southampton City Art collection so we don’t have to lumber the city with millions of pounds of extra debt to create – an arts complex. Each time I write that I still have to blink to accept some folks still don’t get that.

• The hysteria over child and adult sex abuse makes way for measured, civilised, professional action over these most heinous of crimes. Seeing ‘perverts’ in every dark corner, and hounding innocent people who have not been found guilty of anything, is dangerous, debilitating to childhood and frankly not worthy of a civilised society.

• The BBC doesn’t break-up the nation by helping to persuade just enough Scots people for one short period of time that 300 years of the most successful nation on the planet should be thrown away for some imaginary minor financial gain and a little flag-waving. And if you don’t think the Beeb isn’t hell-bent on achieving just this – then watch closely as next September’s vote gets closer.

• The government comes clean and confirms it plans to sell off the second of the new super carriers to the French when completed. Why do you think they have spend extra millions on making both craft capable of taking fighters from other air forces onto their decks? Oh, come on, you didn’t think we could afford to run them both on our own, did you?

• When we get spells of bad weather in 2014 we are spared the sight of TV news reporters out in the bad weather – standing in the torrential rain, amid swirling blizzards or kneedeep in flood waters – warning us not to go out in the bad weather. Ho hum.