The Leamington Observer story about 24-year-old Christine Cuddihy being forced to show her driving licence to staff at her local Tesco languished almost unnoticed on its website for almost a week.

However after an agency repackaged the story after tracking down the woman involved, it quickly became national headline news.

The Daily Mail made it top story on its website on Tuesday with most of the rest of the national media swiftly folllowing suit.

By yesterday morning it had become a top talking-point in BBC radio phone-ins while the Mail's online story had attracted more than 800 reader comments.

Here, the Observer's deputy editor Kevin Unitt, who wrote the original story, charts its bizarre progress through the media.

I knew it was a good story, and hoped it would be picked up by the national press, but none seemed particularly interested at first.

The Sun ran just three lines on it on page 25 last week and the Daily Mail rejected it altogether because The Sun had already covered it, a bizarre decision given they would lead their own website with the story just a few days later.

How our story – which had been printed for almost a week and for all that time had been visible to all on our website leamingtonobserver.co.uk – finally grew legs nationally was the introduction of a press agency, who tracked down the woman involved, slightly re-packaged the story, and sold it on to their national newspaper contacts.

On Tuesday, almost a week after we'd ran the piece, the Daily Mail finally screamed it from their website, making it the top story as it generated more than 600 comments from readers across the world in just 12 hours.

Some treated it for what it was – a funny story. One person in New Zealand said she 'lived in fear of quiche-wielding hoodies', while another reader suggested quiche was a 'gateway to harder stuff like Cornish pasties and pork pies'.

But others began to de-construct and take the fun out, blaming it on everything from New Labour and the 'PC Brigade' to big corporations mentally preparing us for the introduction of national identity cards.

Meanwhile among comments from people in Russia, America, Italy, France, Thailand, Jordan, Spain and Mexico, a Julia from Norfolk even suggested: “I feel I must point out why I think this happened. Quiche is a very high fat food and young people aren't always the best judge of what is and isn't good for them."

Eventually the rest of the national press followed suit by running slightly tweaked versions of the story, while obscure websites across the world also mentioned it.

By yesterday morning BBC radio, both local and national, was in on the action.

And then it returned home with the Coventry Telegraph reporting the story, and BBC Coventry and Warwickshire reporting their report of it.

But Christine, who has had to change her name on internet social networking sites due to random friend requests and seedy messages, says she'd now be quite happy for the quiche incident to be forgotten.

She told the Observer: "I really want all this to stop now. It's quite scary when you read all the comments about you. It was supposed to just be a funny story!"