Ever been annoyed by an insect? Just give it a name.

Bzzz. Bzzzzz. Ugh, get off. It's a Monday night, I'm answering emails and there's a fly flitting around my head.
They love computers, flies, hovering around the screen like it's some kind of insect version of catnip. It's the heat, or the light, I don't know what it is.

Perhaps they love people at computers? Whatever it is that's so enthralling, I wish it wasn't, because I'm trying to answer my emails and I don't want to be hanging around with a fly while I'm doing it.

It disappears. Maybe it's dead. Good. I finish typing and shut down the PC.

Tuesday night, and I'm mucking around on the internet. Not quite sure where the last hour and a half has gone. That seems to be the way with the internet.

Bzzz. Bzzzz. My fly friend is back. It didn't die after all, and must just have been resting, taking a break from its busy schedule of eating things, sicking them back up, eating the result and then having a nice little airborne jaunt to see who it can irritate. And there's only one person in my house, so that's who it picks. Great.

I head downstairs and grab a glass and a piece of cardboard. Let's see who's boss, huh?

Back up I go in search of the creature. It's on the corner of my monitor. I approach, card in one hand, glass in the other, moving my body with as much stealth as I can muster. I pounce. It escapes. I give chase.

The fly heads into my bedroom with me in pursuit. I follow it round the room, clapping the glass and card together in a fruitless attempt to snatch it in mid air.

I leap onto my bed, off the other side, scamper round the edges and then leap back on, and back off. All that's missing is the Benny Hill tune.

Gotcha! Too slow, fly. I open the window and release it into the night. Perhaps, I think, that's where it wanted to be all along. Free.

Wednesday, and I'm sat at my computer.

Bzz. Bzzz. Three guesses. I don't know how it got back in but it seems pointless to try and catch it again. Instead, I head to Wikipedia and type in "fly".

For the unfamiliar, Wikipedia is an internet encyclopaedia. Edited by volunteers, its authority has been called into question, but I wager it knows a lot more about flies than I do.

I scroll down the page in search of details of the insect's life expectancy. Bingo - two weeks, it says. Four weeks if it's a female in a warm environment. There are details of how to tell a male from a female, but my eyesight isn't that good.

So I decide to accept the fly. In three-and-a-half weeks, maximum, it will no longer be a problem. Live and let live, I think. I look at it, scuttling around the corner of my keyboard. Maybe I should name it. I do. I call it Steve.

I close down the computer, clean my teeth and head to bed. I leave the lamp on and sit up with a book.

Bzzz. There's a fly on my bedside table.

"Oh, " I think. "There's Steve." It would be wrong to say I felt any affection towards it, now I had given it a name. But I wasn't annoyed any more.

It doesn't take much for human beings to recognise facial features. Draw two dots and a line and we'll see a face, where a computer would just see two dots and a line.

We humanise things. It helps us to understand them, to process the world in a way we can relate to, compartmentalise and care for.

In our minds, we make them like us.

It seems that the same thing happens when we give them a name.

I look at Steve. You've not got long to live, I think. I guess you can't help wanting company.

Be my guest, buddy. Be my guest.