David Brown is a language consultant and journalist, regularly covering stories in Africa, Asia & the Middle East. He has lived in Finland for 8 years.

HAVE YOU ever noticed that friends here, even good friends, don’t invite you to their house? You’re not alone. I have friends here I have known for five or six years whose homes I have never seen, let alone be invited for a meal.

Whether this strikes you as weird beyond any perverse measure or not may depend on where you come from. In New Zealand, much of our social life revolves around dinner parties. Typically one invites four or five people over, and then spends a week fretting over table settings, the correct way to produce a perfect risotto, and worry over whether the guests will bring enough wine.

Those culinarily challenged can always go with a ‘pot luck’ dinner in which each guest brings a plate of something, anything delicious, or even rely on the Malay takeaway store up the road.

In Finland this rarely happens. A Finn's home is not so much his castle as his retreat, safe from marauding foreigners sent to clean out his wine rack. Being polite types, Finns will generally accept an invitation to your home to dine – they just won’t reciprocate.

Having lived here for eight years now, I am not quite sure why New Zealanders are so obsessed with ‘having people over’. Certainly the climate helps – barbeques are quick and easy to arrange, and all you really need is half a dead cow and a crate of lager. Evolving from that into refined evenings of Marlborough champagnes and salt-baked squid has mirrored our passage from a country famous only for producing butter and wool to one better known for movies and pinot noir.

But I think it is also because we are such relentlessly social people, functional only in large, loud and usually drunken groups that dinner parties have simply become the necessary epitome of our social lives. We would be lost without them.

Whether Finns will ever really develop a taste for dinner parties I don’t know. I suspect not, actually, given the famous Finnish cloistering around the family unit. But at least if not – inviting Finns out for a drink usually seems to please everyone.