Or in the playground. I write this as my heart aches for the five-year-old son of a friend, who this week stood expectantly in his school playground as a fellow pupil’s mum dished out birthday party invitations, only to find he wasn’t invited. So crushed was he at being excluded, and in such a public manner, that he didn’t want to go into school, leaving his poor mum to pick up the pieces. What is wrong with people? If you can’t (or won’t) invite the whole class to Jimmy’s birthday celebrations, why not hand the invites to the teacher who can – discreetly – put the envelopes in the school bags of the selected few? Perhaps the mum in question prefers the tough love approach, or perhaps a similar thing happened to her as a child and she is taking some sort of revenge. Or, more likely, she just didn’t think. […]