I had a proper wtf moment yesterday.
We went to Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park, me, DH and DCs 12 and 9. We do love a good roller coaster. We didn't know which rides we were going to go and and being a bank holiday it was quite busy, so rather than by tokens at each ride we bought a stack of them. We had a great time and when we'd been on everything we wanted to we had 6 tokens (£6 worth) left. We needed to go and get our train so thought we would give them away on our way out. The tokens are valid for all rides, so could have been used on anything from a child's carousel to a roller coaster.
We approached a family who had just arrived and asked them if they had just got here and did they want our unused tokens. The woman just stared at us, shook her head, put her arms around her children and herded them off without a word. Oh, we thought. Weird. So we approached a young couple we had just seen entering WW, and offered the tokens to them. They looked at us and gabbled 'we don't need them' then scuttled away. The kids were bemused by this. Not being deterred, I watched another family with children arriving and took DD to offer the tokens. I assumed a family would not be going to Winter Wonderland with kids for the drinking, so a few ride tokens would be on their list of things to buy. They didn't make eye contact and mumbled 'we'll buy our own.' By this point we definitely needed to be heading off for our train so we set out across Hyde Park. We saw a pair of blokes, one on the phone saying '.... see you inside in a minute...' I asked them if they were going in to Winter Wonderland and they looked at me - one nodded and the other shook his head at the same time. I get it that it was dark, but we were a family of 4 with kids, so hardly axe murderer material!
Eventually we managed to give them to a couple heading that way. The woman said thanks, but held them between forefinger and thumb and passed them instantly to her partner as if they were going to explode.
My DH (who works in London) and my kids (who only go into London for theatre and museum trips) were so amused by our inability to give money away that we decided after the first 3 rebuffs that we would carry on till we managed to give them away. It took 5 goes, and everyone looked at us as though we had 2 heads.
It's no big deal, but this exact attitude was what caused me to move out of London nearly 20 years ago and not look back. I've lived in various northern cities and travel extensively round other major cities around the world with work, and nowhere has the 'we don't talk to strangers' attitude quite like London. It was the busiest and loneliest place I've ever been. It's weird, and a bit sad.