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

As you reach your 50s, you see friendship groups dwindle. As children grow older, cliques at the school gate diminish, while college friends either cement their place as friends or move on and lose touch.

I know I’m an inconsistent friend. I ‘fall in love’ with people I meet, love bomb them and then get upset when they take a few steps away from me because they are so needy.

As a 53-year-old mother of two with a 27-year marriage, I can feel the waning hormones of menopause destroying my people-pleasing instincts and making me much less tolerant of fair-weather ‘friends’ who are there when they need me but don’t step up in return.

So what’s the surest way to lose a friend? Go on vacation with them.

All my trips with my friends ended in disaster. In the sudden glare of living with them 24/7, you see parts of your friends that you don’t really want to see. In the giggles, revelations, and emerging hierarchy orders, you often discover that you don’t actually like them very much. And they don’t like you.

Take a camping trip to Cornwall a few years ago. Six families whose mothers are connected but all know each other relatively well. Or so we thought.

Naturally, we had met through children – mine were six and one at the time – and looking back, there were too many of us to have a holiday without some sort of personality clash between us. In fact, the first hint of this came long before we left London, when an irresistible woman took it upon herself to ‘organise’ us all.

Pre-holiday nonsense should have been a red flag. First, she created a spreadsheet with all our roles and responsibilities – what food each of us would bring, when and where we would take turns supervising the kids, what days we would go to the museum, the beach, for a beach walk – and sent it to our WhatsApp group.

Anniki sometimes feels like friendship isn’t worth the drama and maybe abandoned because she can’t stand it

At first I thought this would be useful as a suggested itinerary. But then I realized he wasn’t requesting information: that’s just how we were to do. It was not negotiable.

A few muttered rebelliously when we were alone, but as usual, we all thanked and praised him for his wonderful research in the group chat. At a pre-holiday Chinese dinner that I naively thought would be ridiculous, we were reminded once again of the strict division of duties.

He had now very firmly established himself as camp leader and holiday representative, and the Brown Owl was all in one. My heart began to sink as I thought about this.

Inevitably it fell apart when we got there. Nobody liked being ‘sent to do the dishes’ because it was their turn. Many people refused to play, creating a ‘them and us’ group dynamic that spoiled the atmosphere from the start.

Meanwhile, we could all see that one couple’s marriage had suddenly gone off the rails. The sullen father didn’t care for his own children, let alone anyone else’s, while his wife hung around trying to cover up his terrible mood. The smile on his face couldn’t fool anyone.

I so wanted my camp leader mom to confront my lazy dad and tell him to stop ruining his family’s trip, but she wouldn’t. Sadly, he seemed to have become accustomed to his own wife’s appalling treatment of him.

The thing is, we didn’t know any of this before we came on vacation. I never saw how bossy the Brown Owl was, nor did I know what a terrible relationship this second friend of mine really was in.

It rained and the sea froze. On the third evening, another mother got so drunk that she fell asleep in the campsite toilet. The next morning he remembered almost nothing about it. It was terrible teenage behavior, but I couldn’t really blame him. The trip was so awful that I would have joined him if I wasn’t on a potato peeling mission.

We returned home and the group seemed to naturally disperse for a while. I was never fully informed about a bottle of wine, but I expressed my dislike of Chef Anne to many people who I considered to be my closer friends.

Big mistake.

A year later, I opened Instagram one morning to see the same family on a similar camping trip in France. I knew nothing about it, although I continued to see some of the Cornish disaster mothers socially. Frankly, Brown Owl had unfriended me. It was like being at school and not getting an invitation to a crowded party, and it hurt a lot for a while. Of course my kids found out about it too, which made it even worse.

Sometimes friendship isn’t worth the drama and maybe I was dumped because I couldn’t stand it.

Friends that matter are the people you think of when you feel lonely. People you have the instinct to send a stupid video or message to. People you reach out to when you have something to celebrate and know they won’t push you behind because you’re showing off. None of the camp crew made the cut – and that’s okay.