Where there's a will, there's often a whiff of controversy What's fascinating about the last will and testament of Joan Edwards - the former nurse who donated her estate of £520,000 to "whichever Government is in office at the date of my death" - isn't so much her generosity, or the unseemly bunfight that erupted after her executors handed the cash to the ruling parties, rather than the Treasury. Instead, it's the humility (or perhaps naivety) of it. She didn't insist that the money go towards a Joan Edwards Foundation, or be spent on particular causes. She simply trusted, out of an old-fashioned sense of deference, that those in authority would have the goodness and wisdom to use it wisely. Some hope, I hear you cry - but given the spirit of the times, it would be much more likely, surely, for such a bequest to come with an egocentric little twist. Why not push the Prime Minister into a game of Brewster's Millions, in which he can only claim the cash under certain hilarious conditions - like if he spends the night in a haunted house? Or walks across Trafalgar Square in his Bullingdon outfit? Or gives Nick Clegg a ceremonial kick up the behind? It was Larkin who observed in "An Arundel Tomb" that "What will survive of us is love." But it takes a real lack of self-importance - which Joan Edwards seems to have had - not to add the codicil: "And a plaque on a park bench, preferably in bronze." Yet equally, there's something oddly admirable about Ozymandias-style attempts to stamp your wishes on eternity. Think of Jeremy Bentham, who had his corpse put on display at University College London (legendarily, when it attends council meetings, it's recorded as "present but not voting"). Whenever such visionaries have their wishes thwarted by petty-minded spoilsports, I always feel slightly sorry. Think of Leona Helmsley, the "Queen of Mean," who tried to leave $12 million to her pet Maltese. Or the Iowa attorney T M Zink, who intended to create the Zink Womanless Library, from which the fairer sex and all its works would be utterly banned. "My intense hatred of women," he stated, "is not of recent origin or development, nor based upon any personal differences I ever had with them, but is the result of my experiences with women, observations of them, and study of all literatures and philosophical works." His family had the will, and the library, quashed. This eternal tension between the desire to dispose of your estate as you wish, and the intrinsic impossibility of actually being there to supervise, is what makes wills, and inheritance, such a compelling topic. Even when the wording's clear enough to avoid a Jarndyce vs Jarndyce situation, controversy is never far away. Scholars have wrangled for centuries over whether Shakespeare meant to be cruel or kind by leaving his wife his "second-best bed." More recently, would Diana, Princess of Wales really want to be remembered by a malfunctioning water feature in Hyde Park? And wouldn't the entrepreneurs who built America - the Fords, Carnegies, Rockefellers et al - be horrified that the foundations established in their name, and with their fortunes, are largely run by tree-hugging liberals? Things become yet thornier when the property is not just physical, but intellectual. Dimitri Nabokov agonised for years over whether to burn his father's last work, The Original of Laura, as instructed. Like the Emperor Augustus, who countermanded Virgil's request that the manuscript of The Aeneid be destroyed, he eventually did the right thing by literary posterity - but not by the deceased. In the end, perhaps it's best to keep things simple. Or to limit any unusual bequests to items with no monetary value - like Robert Louis Stevenson, who gave his friend's daughter his birthday, November 13, because she'd had the rotten luck to be born on Christmas Day. Somehow, I think Joan Edwards would have approved.