The Pebble In Your Pocket
BBC Radio Four

“A little world in its own right.” “It just sits there staring at you.” “Everyone loves a pebble.” There were moments when this (in the end) rather revealing enquiry threatened to collapse into whimsy, and they tended to come with interviewees wandering along windswept beaches to a soundtrack of rustling gravel, gamely poeticising about the treasures between their feet and the multifarious uses to which they could be put.

But to clothing designer Margaret, a devotee of the Orford Ness shingle, the pebble was both a stimulus to her craft and a memento mori. Her son had died young, and her gleanings on the beach had helped to form his memorial. Once romanticism and elegy had been given their due, it was left to Dr Neil Davies, a geologist at Cambridge University, to add a more forensic touch. This one was from France, he briskly informed his interviewer; the holes were made by burrowing insects.