This article came at a very apposite time for me, I inherited a lot of family heirlooms and have spent the last three years avoiding doing anything with them, not knowing much about where they came from or why I ended up with them. A lot of glassware and silver plate, some crockery, lamps etc.

In a fit of efficiency (when the ADHD meds kicked in, and after my wife and I getting fed up of having to squeeze past the boxes) I donated about 80% of them. And then three days ago I stumbled across a handwritten codicil to my grandmother's will where she described in painstaking detail the provenance of each piece, what it meant to her and an anecdote or two about it.

I was devastated, for a few different reasons, my grandmother specifically wanted these things to stay in the family and they'd been cherished and preserved, and I'd just given most of them away. These objects are somehow a repository of all these unprocessed feelings I have about family splits and the grief of losing family contact and continuity. And yet before I knew their stories I was judging them simply on how much I liked or didn't like them and how often I could see us using them.

If I'd discovered the codicil beforehand I'd have had a much harder time deciding what to do with it all. It sounds trite but that handwritten document is actually more of a treasure than the objects themselves.