Letter from Christopher Browne in Salisbury Journal, 4 August 2022

Posted: 4th August 2022

Candle Float

As citizens of Salisbury, we are surely fortunate to live in such a place. We could fold our hands, put all trivial squabbles – such as seen at Westminster – behind us, and congratulate ourselves. But is it OK to be self-satisfied without looking comparatively elsewhere? Much of the earth today is in ruins, through drought, exploitation, war even. Some places are being destroyed right now, and not only in Ukraine. 

To realise the size of the greatest threats hanging over us – here in Salisbury too – we learn that 13,000 nuclear weapons still remain in a febrile warlike world. The Hiroshima Day candle float is to be revived – as before the pandemic – on Monday evening August 8. 

It annually commemorates not only those many thousands who died or suffered loss from the nuclear bombings we inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. It also expresses sorrow that the threat of nuclear war has not been removed from the world even now, 77 years later. Our hope is that threat can be removed before any mistake is made: which is really a hope that our lovely place need not go up in flames.

Instead of those flames, let us watch the calm glow of the candle floats, especially those beautifully hand-made by school children in Hiroshima, which they have specially sent to be part of our Salisbury event at Fisherton Street Bridge at dusk.

Christopher Browne, Salisbury