Last summer I took my family on a walk through the wood-lands around the hamlet of Ebernoe, in West Sussex. My children clambered on fallen trees, my partner and I hunted for mushrooms, and all the while we were being hunted by creatures more ancient than the last dinosaurs – and so hungry they would have fed on us for days.
In Ebernoe, as across the UK, ticks are on the rise. That day, we came home covered in them. One had sunk its serrated mouthparts into the back of my knee. My wife had one feeding on her flank. Another was lodged in the skin of my one-year-old’s neck, its rear legs waggling as it sucked.
Until that day, I’d never been bitten by a tick – and I spent much of my childhood bothering bugs
