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This man was desperate to buy you a pint, so why didn't you LET him?

There's no such thing as strangers, just friends you haven't met yet - or so the saying goes. Whoever came up with that little pearl of wisdom obviously never went out on a lunch-time pub crawl in Leicester.

Today, I'm Mr Generous, the milkman of human kindness, a bloke with long arms and short pockets, desperate to treat the world and his wife to free drinks.

Come on who wants one?

Not Jonathan Popple for a start. "No thank you," he replies politely, never taking his eyes off the fruit machine he's playing.

Go on, have a pint on me.

"You're all right," says the smart-suited 25-year-old.

I'm buying, no strings.

"Why would you want to do that? I don't know you."

Because I'm in a good mood.

"Definitely not," he seethes through gritted teeth. "I don't want one. Now please go away."

You can't walk down the street in many foreign countries without being invited to share a free drink with total strangers and many of us will soon be lapping up the local hospitality on our holidays.

But what if a person you've never met makes the same offer back home?

I'm armed with £30 of the Mercury's money to find out.

Only a day or two ago a mischievous old dear at an Age Concern luncheon club told me I was a lovely young lad and asked me to sit on her lap after an interview.

Yet now I'm being seen as a weirdo, mentally deranged, a drunk, a sexual predator or just a pathetic, lonely little man.

In Leicester, it seems, most of us stubbornly believe nothing in life is free.

Students Sarah Herringshaw, 18, and Kirsty Wilkinson, 18, roll their eyes and mime oh-my-God grimaces from behind their hands as I badger them to have a beer. Sarah tactfully tells me she'd had me down as a sad, old bloke trying to buy a bit of companionship after I come clean about my real motives.

Kirsty puts it a little more bluntly.

"You looked well dodgy," she laughs. "It was a little bit scary to be honest. I wasn't going to let you buy us a drink. You might have tried to drug us and God knows what else."

Insurance clerk Graham Moreton does eventually accept a pint of bitter, but only after a lot of pleading on my part.

It turns out the 53-year-old, from Blaby, saw it as the best chance of getting me to go away so he could watch the football in peace.

"I had various thoughts," he confesses.

"Was this some sort of pick-up, or were you the local pub nutter?

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