Why is everyone so incredibly judgmental? OP was in charge of a fairly new baby whose screams and inability to settle could have signaled a real problem that OP had not yet encountered.
Set against that the fact that she was unaware that a cancelled cup of tea would be treated by half mumsnet as a crushing betrayal of friend on a par with judas’s betrayal of christ. My god the injustice! Maybe its the fact that Im not from the UK but driving a half hour, or even missing a treat, is really not considered an earth shattering cost to a friendship.
This thread really showcases the worst of mumsnet faux contrarianism. OP is excoriated for attending to her baby’s needs and scanting her friend on the grounds that she is previous, incompetent, fussy, unable to handle her child, probably won’t be able to manage future children or drop offs at nursery like the “good” mumsnetters do.
Meanwhile the friend is excused for flying off the handle, attacking OP, and ending the friendship over an absolutely trivial event. Ordinarily the friend would be pilloried for her selfish and intemperate behavior.
I usually hang out here playing a game of reading and trying to figure out who is going to be attacked on AIBU as unreasonable. The hidden key is that usually the person who is “unreasonable “ is found to have broken an unwritten rule of British phlegm: you must not ever show passion or allude to a difficulty performing a task. You must not ever show disappointment with other people’s behavior or have unmet expectations.
By that metric I would have thought most people would have faulted the friend for her rather pathetic and over the top response to a minor event:cancelled treat. Very unphlegmatic!
Instead people are putting the boot in and scoring the OP for failure to take proper care of a grown woman’s ickle feelings when she had a baby whose needs were unaligned with a car ride to a cafe.