Sex with Fruit and Other Foods: an email from the year 2050 - and a cynical attempt to increase traffick to this wonderful piece by sexing up the title.

I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is there is lots of sex in the future; the bad news is not much is between humans.

Once upon a time the best sex you could get was the kind between consenting adults. The kind you had to work at getting and that carried the potential for life changing consequences, like enduring partnerships, love and children. The messy kind that was breath-taking, heart-thumping and mind-cleansing. The kind that fathered pride, pleasure, passion and sometimes, less pleasingly, embarrassment and shame.

Then came technology. The same technology that crammed the world into your phone and killed everything from newspapers to conversation. It has just about killed good old-fashioned sex too. Replaced all but the shadow of it with virtual sex of a wondrous but barren and dangerous kind.

How to Greet a Killer

How do you greet a killer? Law school does not prepare you for it. Nor does the bar practice course or pupillage. For most barristers this is not a deficiency in the learning because the likelihood of acting for a killer is small. However for criminal defence barristers, especially those who achieve some seniority, the likelihood becomes certainty.

What do you do when you finally meet that rarest of beasts, the human being who has taken the life of another.