And so, to indulge in an appalling cliché, a journey of discovery followed. Out there in internet-land are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of websites devoted to Peak Oil. I should perhaps explain what the term means before going any further. Simply put, it refers to the point at which all the easy-to-extract oil has been sucked out of the ground leaving only the really hard to get to, very expensive to refine, stuff. Now, there is a great deal of debate amongst geologists and petro-industry experts about how much oil there is left in the ground. It ranges from either a doom ’n’ gloom scenario that we’ve already ‘peaked’ and it’s rapidly running out, to a naively optimistic view that we have another fifty or sixty years of untapped oil. I’m not going to make a call on that debate here. But what no one disagrees on is how utterly reliant we are on the stuff. If you’re reading this, having read the book, you don’t need me to reiterate here the warnings Andy offered his family. The fact is, with globalism having run its course, the world is now inextricably linked as one large, interlocked set of dependencies; we get our sausages from this far flung country, our trainers from that far flung country, our plasma TVs from yet another far flung country . . . and so on.

Whether we’re about to run out of oil, or whether the world is approaching a clash of religious ideologies or an economic - possibly military - showdown between the new economic superpowers and the old; whether the world’s climate is on the cusp of a dramatic change that could imperil billions and lead to mass migration; whichever one of these scenarios lies ahead of us, to be so completely dependent - as we are here in the UK - on produce grown, packaged and manufactured on the other side of the world . . . well, that’s simply asking for trouble.

Last Light is the book I’ve wanted to, no, needed to write since . . . well, since 9/11. It’s not really a book about Peak Oil - that was merely the starting point for me. No, it’s a book about how lazy and vulnerable we’ve allowed ourselves to become. How reliant on the system we are. How little responsibility we are prepared to take for our actions, for ourselves, for our children. Somewhere along the way, in the last two or three decades, we broke this society of ours; whether it was during Blair’s tenure of power, or Thatcher’s, I’m not sure. But somehow it got broken.

And here we are, the ghastly events of 7/7; the increasing prevalence of gang related gun crime in London; legions of disaffected kids packing blades to go to school; a media that night and day pumps out the message - screw everyone else, just get what’s yours; reality TV that celebrates effortless transitory fame over something as old-fashioned as ‘achievement’; corporations that rip off their employees’ pension funds; a Prime Minister deceiving us into entering an ill-conceived war; and politicians of all flavours putting themselves and their benefits first. All these things, I suspect, are the visible hairline cracks of our broken society that hint at the deeper, very dangerous, fault lines beneath. And all it’ll take is some event, some catalyst, for the whole thing to come tumbling down.

Damn . . . this has turned into something of a rant, hasn’t it? That wasn’t my intention. Ah well sod it, ‘author’s note’ is my one opportunity to get things off my chest without having to worry about plot, character and pacing.

Anyway, I’d like to think that a whiff of Last Light will remain with you once you snap the cover shut. I’m hoping Andy Sutherland achieved something; that the world looks slightly different to you now - more fragile, more vulnerable. After all, to be aware is to be better prepared.

I dunno . . . is it just me? Or do you get that feeling too? That something’s coming, something on the horizon . . . a correction of some sort?