Saw a French language film last night - it was set in the UK.
The plot is that a British woman has a holiday fling with a French bloke in a Mediterranean seaside resort. He sleeps with anything in a skirt bikini.
Twelve months later she turns up with a three-month old - borrows 20€ to pay for the taxi - walks back to her taxi and gets in and drives away.
Our hero is left holding the baby - he thinks he knows where the mother works so chases after her to London. Fails to find her - sends endless messages to her FB account but we can see that she has never logged back in to her account. So, he gets a job in London (despite not really speaking the language), and changes his life completely so that it revolves around his daughter.
Eight years on, he has a lovey happy, bright, bi-lingual daughter with whom he has an incredible relationship. Dad has sent regular updates to FB but the mother has never read them or even logged back in.
Then Mum waltzes back in to town - she was in a "bad place" when she dumped the baby - he has done a great job... she has a new bf and sues for custody.
The judge peers over his spectacles at them both and awards custody to the "parent the child knows best" - her father.
So then the bitch mother demands a paternity test - he is not the biological father.
Plod turns up with mother to ensure that he hands over the child.
This is the part that seemed wrong to me. The judge said when he awarded custody to the father that he had to make a judgement "in the child's best interests": surely that should still apply as the father is the only parent the child has ever known - he is the de facto adoptive father.... and furthermore the mother now lives in the USA so the child will be uprooted from all that is familiar to her to go and live in a strange country with people she doesn't know - on the grounds that one of them gave birth to her, despite the woman abandoning her when she was three months old.
OK, so it's a film - but a like my fiction with at least a semblance of reality - would the courts really insist that the child be returned to the mother in a case like this - as if she was a possession being returned to her rightful owner?