CAT-LOVER Biddy Lee returned home from a supermarket shopping trip and found one of her shopping bags teeming with maggots.

The mother-of-two, of Rignall Road, Great Missenden, found the writhing mass spilling from cat food after doing her weekly shop at Tesco, Old Amersham, on Monday.

She said: 'The packs of cat food were crawling with maggots - the smell was like something that had died.

'It looked like the foil cover had been pulled away and all the contents were brown and runny. My whole house stank.'

Biddy rang the store immediately and later returned all goods that had been in contact with the 29p packs of Friskies Gourmet Gold cat food.

But she said she was surprised at the cool reaction of store staff who replaced the returned goods and gave her £10 to cover petrol costs.

She said: 'I had to take the whole bag back and I was expecting a lot of flapping around or comments about how terrible it was. But the manager didn't meet me and didn't leave a message or anything - he couldn't even be bothered to see me.

'I was trying to push for how it could have happened but they didn't seem to think it was anything great. They acted as if it happened all the time.'

A spokesman for Tesco said: 'We will take this up on behalf of our customers with our suppliers. The product was not a Tesco product so there will be a full investigation to find out exactly what went wrong. We will contact Mrs Lee when the investigation is complete.'