This is what I did on a toxic middle-class school mums’ camping trip to Cornwall that got me banned from the friendship group – and why I don’t regret it

Once you hit your 50s, you find friendship groups dwindling. School-gate cliques diminish as children get older while university pals either cement their place as BFFs or move and lose touch.

I know that I am an inconsistent friend. I get ‘crushes’ on people I meet, lovebomb them, and then feel upset when they inch away from me for being too needy. As a 53-year mum of two in a 27-year marriage, I can also feel the waning hormones of menopause stripping out my people-pleasing instincts and making me far less tolerant of fair weather ‘friends’ who are there when they need you but don’t step up in return.

But the surest way to lose friends? Go on holiday with them.

All my trips away with pals have been disastrous. In the sudden glare of living alongside them 24/7, you see parts of your friends that you’d really rather not have seen. In the niggles and the revelations and the newly-exposed pecking orders, you all too often discover you don’t actually like them very much. And they don’t like you.

Take the camping trip to Cornwall a few years ago. Six families, bonded by the mums, but all relatively well known to each other. Or so we thought.

We’d met through children, naturally – mine were then six and one years old – and with hindsight there were too many of us to holiday without some sort of personality clash. Indeed the first hint of it came well before we’d even left London when one insufferable woman took it upon herself to ‘organise’ us all.

The pre-holiday rigmarole should have been a red flag. Early on she drew up a spreadsheet containing all our roles and responsibilities – what food we would each bring, when and where we would be taking turns to supervise children, the days on which we would go to the museum, the beach, for a coastal hike – and pinged it to our WhatApp group.

At first I thought this was helpful as a suggested itinerary. But then I realised she wasn’t asking for input: this was what we were doing. It was non-negotiable.

A few people muttered mutinously in private, but in usual don’t-rock-the-boat fashion, we all thanked and praised her for her brilliant research on the group chat. At a pre-holiday Chinese, which I’d naively thought would be a laugh, we were reminded again of the strict division of duties.

She had now very firmly cast herself as camp leader and holiday rep and Brown Owl all rolled into one. My heart began to sink at the thought of it.

Inevitably, it fell apart when we got there. No one liked being ‘sent to wash up’ because it was their turn. Several people point blank refused to play, setting up a ‘them and us’ group dynamic that soured the atmosphere from the start.

Meanwhile, we could all suddenly see that one of the couples’ marriages was fast veering off the rails. The sulky dad wouldn’t even look after his own kids, let alone anyone else’s, while his wife ran around trying to cover up for his horrible moods. The smile she slapped on was fooling no one.

I desperately wanted camp leader mum to confront lazy dad and tell him to stop ruining the trip for his family, but she wouldn’t. Depressingly, it seemed his own wife was just used to his terrible treatment of her.

The point is, we’d known none of this before we came on holiday. I’d never clocked how bossy Brown Owl was, nor did I know how awful a relationship this second friend was truly in.

It rained and the sea was freezing. On the third evening, another mum got so drunk she fell asleep in the campsite loos. The next morning she could barely remember anything about it. It was awful, teenage behaviour but I didn’t really blame her. The trip was so hideous, I’d have joined her had I not been on spud peeling duty.

We got back home and for a while the group seemed to disperse naturally. There was never a full debrief over a bottle of wine, but I did express my dislike of Chief Mum to several of those I considered closer friends.

Big mistake.

A year later, I opened Instagram one morning to see this same bunch of families on a very similar camping trip in France. Even though I’d kept seeing some of the Cornish calamity mums socially, I had known nothing about it. Clearly Brown Owl had unfriended me. It felt like being at school and not getting an invite to an in-crowd party and for a while it hurt like hell. Of course my kids got wind of it too, which was even worse.

Sometimes friendship isn’t worth the drama – and perhaps I’d been dumped because I wasn’t going to put up with it.

The friends that matter are the ones you think about when you feel lonely. The ones that you get an instinct to send a silly video or text to. The ones you reach out to when you’ve got something to celebrate and know they won’t slag you off behind your back for showing off. None of the camping crew made the cut – and that’s okay.