In April 1981 the typically dreary tone of Monday morning assembly at Eastwood High School was cranked up a few thousand notches by the fact that we had a guest speaker.

And this was no ordinary guest speaker.

James Irwin was the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 15 and the eighth person to walk on the moon barely nine years earlier. He happened to come to our school in a quiet suburb of Glasgow, Scotland, to talk about his experiences in NASA, the Apollo 15 mission and what it was like to have set foot on another heavenly body. He brought along a piece of moon rock which he briefly held aloft from the front of the stage.

In common with a number of other NASA astronauts, Irwin had returned to earth in 1972 with an augmented religious faith. Some have likened the experience of travelling so far away from Earth that you can block out its very existence from view with just the thumb of your hand, as metaphorically god-like. Whatever had happened to Irwin as he looked back to Earth from the lunar surface, this same force had brought him to our Monday assembly to talk about the moon and god.

I recall that the somewhat incongruous associations Irwin made between science and faith were both interesting and uninteresting; my twelve-year-old self wished at the time that Irwin had just stuck to speaking about the moon.

But looking back now as an adult, I realise that it was an amazing privilege to hear and see him at all, and it gave my already growing interest in science and technology a real push. Religion, not so much.