A disgusted customer has spoken of his horror at finding a twitching mouse after tucking in to his Chinese takeaway soup. 

Hungry Sam Hayward had already begun eating his his mushroom noodle soup before he spotted something moving at the bottom.

The shocked 39-year-old, from Strood in Kent, filmed the rodent and rang the local restaurant his girlfriend Emily had ordered from.

But the takeaway denied having provided the food and, having paid with cash, Mr Hayward and his partner were unable to prove their purchase as they had no receipt.

Mr Hayward, who runs construction company Hayward's Building and Contractors, said he initially thought the rodent was a large mushroom before noticing a 'tail'.

On the meal he'd rather forget, he said: "My missus rang me up asking if I wanted anything to eat and I said I fancied a jacket potato."

"She said she wanted a Chinese, so she won that one."

"I started eating and got about three-quarters to halfway through it and then thought, 'That's a big mushroom, isn't it?'. "

"It was twitching... I'm no animal expert, but it couldn't have been alive."

"The tail was the first thing I saw and it just freaked me out. "

"I couldn’t believe it. It made me feel sick. I probably spent about 25 minutes in the toilet after trying to make myself sick."

"I just wanted to throw up straight away. I've got a pretty strong stomach, but this was another level."

"Just thinking about it makes me feel sick."

Stunned and confused as to what to do, Mr Hayward decided to take a video of the mouse twitching in his takeaway to prove to others what had happened.

On what made him grab his phone, Mr Hayward explained: "I was still in shock. I don’t know why I filmed it but I did."

"The first thing I wanted to do was get mad at someone so I phoned the takeaway up and they said to prove it."

"Emily used cash only and we didn’t get a receipt, so we couldn’t."

Mr Hayward says the Chinese restaurant in Gillingham, where he had been a regular customer for nearly 20 years, have just denied that it was their food.

He said: "All I wanted was for them to apologise - it's just the principal. "

"I didn't want them to say, 'Sam, you have free Chinese food for life'... I wouldn't have wanted it."

Busy with work, Mr Hayward said he has yet to report the incident to his local environmental health department.