Hmm. I probably should have drunk slightly less at the party last night, or alternatively stayed in bed for another couple of hours. However, I didn't want to do the latter due to my grand plan to readjust my personal time zone to the point where I can usefully go to work tomorrow, and by the time I thought of the former it was too late.

Oh well. Happy New Year, everyone!

Well, another arbitrary division of the calendar has arrived, so it's probably time for the semitraditional annual review.

This time two years ago I wrote that 2005 had been the slowest year in my love life since it originally managed to get going. Well, now it isn't any more; 2007 has beaten its record. Nothing whatsoever happened in my love life, for the entire year.

Work was unusually stressful, for several reasons, foremost among which was that I unexpectedly had to take over responsibility for a colleague's code mid-way through the product cycle, and then try to meet the deadlines he'd committed to without his detailed knowledge of how it all worked. (While not missing a beat on my existing responsibilities, naturally; although fortunately those haven't been particularly demanding this year – which was one reason the new stuff chose me to land on.) Not only that, but I had to do all of this while going through the stress of a first-time house purchase, and also I didn't get a holiday for several months longer than I usually go between breaks (because given my housing situation it simply wouldn't have been restful anyway). Add that lot up, and you're looking at someone who seriously needed a rest when I finished work for the year.

But without question, the biggest thing that happened to me all year was the abovementioned house purchase: I have now successfully joined the ranks of the filthy landowning bourgeoisie, and only missed by a few months doing so before turning thirty. This process actually took me nearly all year – in fact, a little of last year too if you count my preliminary investigation of mortgage options in very late 2006. I didn't talk about it much while it was going on, not least because I didn't want to jinx it, but the rough timeline went something like this:

February: began seriously looking. Found an entirely workable house, and after some dithering made an offer. Owner promptly took the house off the market.
May: three months of on-and-off hunting having got me nowhere, I took two weeks off work and applied myself more vigorously. Found an even better house and made another offer, which was accepted.
August: exchange and completion, the latter nearly at the end of the month.
October: actually moved in, having stayed in the old rented flat for over a month while I had the place pre-emptively redecorated and recarpeted. Almost immediately wished I'd had it pre-emptively rewired as well, since the electrics went out within a week.
December: got the place to the point where I was able to laze around in it without constantly coming up against things that desperately needed doing. Some things do still need doing, naturally, but they're not terribly urgent (yet).

Now I'll have to find something different to stress me out in 2008!

If someone lives near me, and I decide I'd like to spend some time with them, my usual approach is to invite them over for dinner. It's fairly clear that this is the polite thing to do whereas attempting to invite myself to theirs would be rude, and it's fairly clear that this is because the host is the one who does all the work: extra cooking, making the place respectable beforehand, washing up afterwards etc. So volunteering to make all that effort myself is polite, whereas trying to manoeuvre the other person into doing it is rude.

All of that is well known and uncontroversial. But how, if at all, does the picture change when the person in question lives sufficiently far away that travelling there and back is liable to be at least as much effort and hassle as the duties of the host?

I find I can't quite make a case either way which convinces me. I would feel a bit rude inviting someone to dinner if accepting the invitation necessarily involved them sitting on trains or in traffic jams for longer than I expected to spend cooking, and yet I would also feel just as rude inviting myself to have dinner with them so that they had all the hosting responsibilities. Neither seems to me to be the obviously more polite option.

Currently, my best solution is to issue an either-way invitation. ‘I'd like to have dinner with you, how about it? If so, your city or mine?’ But that doesn't really seem ideal to me either: it's long, unwieldy, and has a nervous, talking-too-much, downright Hugh Grant vibe to it which is rarely if ever what I want. What do other people do?

Perhaps such dinners should always be held in complementary pairs: home and away.