Operation Megalithic Lift - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 206

because we were all tiring. One of them took the concerted efforts
of all present to hold it on to the alignment, and it insisted on
rotating before it could be wedged upright, so the northwest arc
of stone is not as tidy as I would have liked. But with them all in
place (Fig. 7.11 ) , the foundation for the central stone could be pre-
pared (Fig. 7.12 ), and we could call it a day at the site.
On the public relations side, due to the short notice, there
were still major commitments to be fulfilled. In late 1978 plans
had been drawn up for a much enlarged educational astronomy
project, and we now had an illustrator, David McClymont, who
was working on a leaflet to be handed out to the schoolchildren
and the public during the operation. We were taking part in an
ambitious class project at Faifley Primary School and Ian Downie,
the Astronomy Section head of ASTRA, was standing in for us on
that and other commitments. Now we were asked to prepare a dis-
play board for the press conference at St. Stephen's Primary School
the following morning, March 20. John Braithwaite stayed at the
office overnight to do so, and Dave McClymont mounted it up
immediately beforehand, while hundreds of copies of his leaflets
were being run off. Other ASTRA members who had come in to
help were pressed into service folding them, while spaceflight dis-
play boards on loan to the project from ASTRA were mounted in
the S.T.E.P. building recreation room in preparation for the recep-
tion after the event.
One of the trials of Special Projects was an individual who was
known to those he shared an office with as 'The Vicar' - a designation
that particularly annoyed him, since he was fervently Presbyterian.
His project had no other members, from which you may draw your
own conclusions. We called him 'Ezekiel' because the astronomical
or extraterrestrial content of that Old Testament book was his nor-
mal conversational gambit. He used different ones with other people,
but whatever the opening, within 4 min he would have reached his
serious business, a personal message that began, “You see, I believe
that Jesus is our personal savior,” and go on in that vein for as long
as he was allowed to. My personal defense was to interrupt regularly,
saying, “Yes, but that's just what you believe,” until he lost his tem-
per and gave me an excuse to end the attempted conversion. It could
not be called a conversation or a discussion by any normal social
definition. John's reply was more direct, namely that the next time