Sentiment.

I gave been spending time helping our daughter move house, going through piles of stuff, throwing out piles of paper, half used colouring books and broken toys. I remember those half-used colouring books from my childhood. You begin a new book, full of enthusiasm, and produce some apparent masterpieces. The book is set aside at some point and when you find it again weeks, or even months, later it has somehow lost its appeal and you no longer want to colour in the pictures. And yet it seems wrong to throw it away. After all, it has so many unused pages!

The teenager in the family is the worst offender. Like her mother and, indeed, her grandmother, she is something of a stationery fan. We all three happily walk around stationery shops admiring notebooks and finding a reason to buy just one more. We all three have collections of notebooks set aside for a rainy day. Forcing the teenager to go through her stuff, I came across piles of old exercise books from high school. Was she emotionally attached to these? Not especially. So why were they kept? Well, they all have substantial sections of unused pages which might come in useful to jot down ideas for stories; she is an inveterate story-writer, submitting them to Internet forums and the like. I had to work hard to persuade her to cull at least some of these. 

And then there are the soft toys. There is a huge dustbin bag full of them in a corner of her room. Surely she can do without some of them. Her younger sister is almost as bad, although she has agreed to send a good number of soft toys to charity shops, provided they are not pandas. She is very fond of pandas! The youngest of the family, a boy, has cheerfully said that almost all his soft toys can be got rid of. And then I heard his mother telling him that he should keep a certain teddy bear as it was the first soft toy he ever received. You can see where his sisters' sentimentality comes from. Their mother has everyone's first pair of shoes, not to mention her son's first football kit. 

People grow attached to things from their past. Sometimes it doesn't even need to be a past they have really lived through. Recently there has been the case of a woman who divorced her husband years ago. Or maybe he divorced her. Perhaps it was mutual consent. It's immaterial anyway. At the time neither had any money to speak of; no, they had been new-age travellers. In later years he founded a green energy company and made a fortune. Twenty five years along the line, living on benefits, she has gone to court demanding a share of his assets. I believe she has been granted a fairly substantial sum. There was a child but it is not clear how much support the millionaire gave to that child along the way. The child has, however, lived with his father since he was 18 so he's clearly not been cut off without a penny. 

I find myself confused about this case. My feminist self has seriously mixed feelings. Absent fathers should support their offspring, most certainly. Ex-wives who have spent time bringing up children deserve some help. But how far does this support have to go? Doesn't being a feminist also mean taking pride in being independent? This woman was only married to the now-millionaire for a couple of years. Presumably she didn't actually contribute to the creation of the fortune. By the time he was making his fortune, surely their son was old enough for her to go out and find a job. 

It must be a little galling to think that if she had stayed with him she could have shared his good fortune but life is like that. I once knew someone who had been the guitarist with a group who went on to make masses of money only months after he dropped out and got a "proper job". I wonder if he felt he had the right to claim part of their fame and fortune. 

And in the case of the ex-wife claiming from her quarter-of-century-divorced husband, if she had made the fortune and he had lived on benefits, would the courts have granted him a share of the riches?