The following is really worrying!
I did a multiple-day walk with 3 nights wild camping in Snowdonia between Thursday 14 and Sunday 18 September, after which I spent 3 nights in a big tent on a Shropshire campsite before I returned home on Wednesday 20th.
As I've written before in this forum, I often pick up ticks, but this time I only had one which rather incongruously attached itself to the knuckle of my little finger. I am sure there were no others, because I am so used to looking for them (even to the extent of using a mirror...
)
This afternoon, Saturday 30th, I was working on my laptop when I became aware of an itching on the front of my ankle, and I rolled down my sock to find a tick on me. Its position made it difficult to see properly, but I succeeded in removing it with my O'Tom Tick Twister and then rubbed in some Germolene. I checked the culprit under a x10 hand lens before dropping it in some very hot water.
Now where the hell did it come from? I live in the outer suburbs of NW London where they are absent as far as I'm aware, I don't have any pets and I haven't been in any grassy or wooded areas since my my return. I've had six or seven showers since coming home, and all the clothing I wore has been laundered. All I can think is that the socks I wore today could have been an unworn pair I returned home with, and somehow the creature found its way into them sometime during my trip.