In the next moment, the crows exploded upwards from a small copse of poplar farther up the hill. I tensed, wondering what had spooked them. There was a real danger of encountering predators with no memory, and therefore no fear, of human beings. Over the years I had caught glimpses of bears and even lions, presumably escaped from zoos or circuses after their owners died. Several winters ago I’d had a nasty encounter with a polar bear that came charging out of an alleyway.

Dogs were undoubtedly the worst. The smaller ones had mostly died out in the years following the apocalypse, leaving the larger, fiercer specimens to dominate. After a winter like this one they would be hungry indeed, and I never stepped outside my door without a loaded shotgun under my arm.

I listened, but heard nothing more. More than likely the crows had been startled by a badger or fox. Even so, I kept watching out as I shut the door behind me. I walked past an outbuilding containing a processing tank that turned cheap vegetable oil raided from deserted supermarkets into biodiesel, then I stepped through a wooden gate leading into a field where sheep had once grazed. The place in which I now made my home was an ultra-modern affair, a boxy construction with broad glass windows, constructed, so far as I could tell, mere months before the apocalypse. I had it found it pristine and unlived in; better still, it was easy to keep warm, even in the depths of a winter such as this.

I followed a well-worn path up the side of the hill until I came to a line of twin-bladed wind turbines. There were a dozen in all, tall and graceful and rising high above me. Only three still functioned. The rest stood silent, despite my vain attempts to repair them. I had never been able to find the necessary spare parts.

The turbines were one of the main reasons I chose to settle where I did. I had driven fence posts into the hillside, paralleling the path leading to the turbines, and strung thick cables all the way down the hill to my chosen home. From the top of the hill I could see what had been the town of Wembury in the distance, still Christmas-card pretty under its blanket of snow despite the recent rain.

The blades of the remaining three turbines that still worked spun steadily under a freezing wind. I made my way inside a transformer shed next to one of them and first checked the voltmeter and then the storage batteries. I kept expecting to come up the hill and find another of the turbines dead.