The Oldie

The final countdown

‘Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.’
Walt Whitman

Green Light Day

As we sit in gridlocked traffic, we are bickering because we have just missed a turning and now we are stuck.

The jam is making us late, and so we are burbling away in the same way as we always have since we first met 16 years ago. It is oddly reassuring – both right and human. It is because of these two things, being right and human, that we are trying to work out how to get back to the little road that we have just missed.

Norah Vincent has flown in from New York to meet a wise, careful psychiatrist who will decide if this is to be Green Light Day.

She is 53, bestseller author whose fourth and final book was , a novel based on her exhaustive research into the last part of Virginia Woolf’s life and her suicide.

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Oldie

The Oldie3 min read
Mother's Fall – And The Descent Of Man
Mother fell. She ended up sitting, back against the wall, like a weary-looking soft toy on a slow edition of The Repair Shop. I called the emergency services. While I was on to them, I told them my underactive thyroid medication had recently delivere
The Oldie4 min read
How Your Garden Grows
Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life By Jason Roberts riverrun £25 The year is 1707. Separated by some 700 miles (as the Corvus comix flies), two naturalists are born, destined for world fame. Social climbing (sorry, mobilit
The Oldie1 min read
Map Of British Drunks
This is the story of drink maps. It’s not about pub crawls or plotted ale trails. Instead, these are maps with an agenda that was hostile to drinking alcohol, made by the Temperance Movement. The logic at the time of the maps’ creation went: if peopl

Related Books & Audiobooks