Get lost, deer keds!

There is a fly in my eye.

Or right next to my eye. It feels like its trying to get into the eye though, and it's not being removed by a regulation brushing or swatting motion, so I have to squeeze it between my fingers and chuck it off.

It's the same for the ones on my arms, and on the back of my neck. The ones on my legs are getting away with it because there are too many of its brethren crawling around further up my body.

We are trying to climb a mountain in Knoydart - home of mainland Britain's remotest pub - but the heat, our lack of water, and these godforsaken flying menaces are making things very difficult.

What the hell are they, and why won't they get off me!

Even when we get off the mountain they are still there, burrowing around our hair and we keep finding them hours later, scuttling over our skin with no wings, more like spiders than flies. Writing this I can feel their tiny little feet all over my neck.

Googling on the ferry back to Mallaig, we find that these are not your ordinary fly - how could they be? - and are instead deer keds (only click that link if you want to see a horrible looking creepy crawly).

The name indicates the cause of the main problem - these wee beasties are designed to land on deer, but they are instead mistaking our human hair for the nice, welcoming back of a cervine mammal.

When they land on the deer they shed their wings - quite a deranged quirk of evolution, giving them no other options should the whole thing go south. But if indeed they have landed on a deer then its happy days for the ked, because deer famously don't have hands, and so cannot pluck them off.

Landing on a human then, is a worst-case scenario for both the deer ked and the human - from their perspective because they are going to be removed to (at best) wander around wingless, and from the human perspective because it requires hours of rigorous manual removal of slippery, squirming, snide little shits.

Midges, obviously, are the classical scourge of the Scottish summer, and everyone knows to check for ticks, with the risk of Lyme disease they may carry, but the discovery of this fresh hell has coloured my relationship with the outdoors.

There is no option other than to stay inside and consume a massive amount of media - so perhaps you'll see me making my return to televisual quizzing at some point in the near future. Though not on University Challenge, because in order to get to class I'd have to leave the house, risking another encounter with a swarm of wriggling critters.

So there's no risk of me appearing in the second round facing either of the two teams who played tonight - Warwick and UEA, which is the University of East Anglia, not a typo for the United Arab Emirates.

Warwick and UEA played in 2007, a match Jack McB recounted in great detail in a recent blog of his, discussing it as one of the great sliding doors moments in UC history.

We'll have to wait a while to see if this match lives up to the same billing. If you want to watch the episode before reading the rest of the post you can do so here.

Here's your first starter for ten.

Warwick skipper Siddle, wearing a university squash club top with an unacceptable logo or brand taped over on his left sleeve, opens the scoring with Afghanistan. A full set of bonuses on the US electoral system follows, before Hart adds to their lead with Andre, with one of the clues relating to Andre the Giant, who was known as the eighth wonder of the world in the WWE.

Other candidates for the eighth wonder of the world include the Giant's Causeway, the Great Wall of China, and, perhaps bizarrely, the Forth Road Bridge. Although maybe they had to build that while being attacked by deer keds in which case it fully deserves the title.

Hart is able to see the big picture, taking a second starter with IMAX and another perfect set extends their lead to 60 points before Willis gets UEA off the mark with Malta on a picture starter.

The First Picture Starter

I always agonise about describing the picture starters by specifying their number - i.e. the first picture starter, the second picture starter. But I've never the liked the phrasing - it's too clunky and long. However, I can't describe it as the picture starter, because there are two of them, even though it is incredibly obvious from context which one I'm referring to. Equally, it has always felt silly to say 'a picture starter' when there are only two, but maybe that's just me being silly (perhaps this is all just me being silly). So I'm going to try that out for a few weeks and see how it goes.

UEA took a full set of island nations on the picture bonuses, and Willis grabbed himself another starter with shoulder. There's a quote by the author Robert Muchamore where he complains about how sometimes when you spot that you are over-using certain words (as authors often do, especially in first drafts) you realise that there are no real alternatives. The word in question was shoulder. There's not really much you can say instead of shoulder.

Hart hits back for Warwick - he's shouldering the burden for them on the buzzer so far. He takes the music starter too (I can simply say the music starter because there is only one of them, and you don't know how much relief this gives me every time), with such a quick buzz that Rajan does a fourth wall breaking look to camera.

UEA's North mishears the request for a Jane Austen character rather than novel on the next starter, giving Mansfield Park instead of Fanny Price, and I'm worried that both sides are going to miss a starter on Black Sabbath, but Watson takes the points for Warwick. They race through another full set on lesser-known brass instruments, then Hart takes another starter with Markov chains. They are flying (but not like deer keds), and have a lead of more than a hundred.

Shaffrey closes the gap with Plutarch, and closes it further with South Africa next time around and further still with The Aviator on a picture starter (I'm not sure I like that any more than 'second picture starter' to be honest), but Warwick remain 70 points clear thanks to Hart's buzzer jamboree, and the gulf between the sides would only increase as the gong approached.

Warwick 275 - 125 UEA

This match wasn't close enough to be a sliding doors moment, I don't think, with Warwick looking very impressive going into the second round. UEA can be proud of their performance, and should be glad they didn't encounter any deer keds on the way home.

See you next week for the series' first Oxbridge derby as St Cath's, Cam take on Wadham, Ox.