This morning, I attended the VJ ceremony in Barkers Pool.
It was, deliberately, very small, with recorded music and some readings.

This is a poignant day for me. My father was a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore. He had TB and, following his release, had to be transported to hospital first in Kolkatta, then on to Johannesburg where the air was cleaner.

He finally arrived back home in Yorkshire in late 1946.

Life is full of twists and turns. He was 22, and a conscientious objector, in 1939 at the start of WWII. He joined up anyway, because he understood the Nazi threat, but as a medical orderly; he knew he couldn't pull the trigger to kill someone.

But his release came at the cost of over 100,000 lives, most of them civilian non-combattants.
And if the bombs hadn't been dropped, he may well have died from TB.
And my brother, my sister and I would never have been born.

This is a conundrum I live with. I don't think I'll ever work it out. I'm here, tweeting this, because of the two A-bombs.
The best sense I can make of it is to be anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-racist.

One of the speakers today said we won the war so we could all live in peace.
But we haven't.
The war settled nothing. And unless we work hard to get things settled, those who died in that war and all wars since have become little more than statistics.

So I'm anti-war. And I'm anti- whatever causes war. A system which drives people to more and more profit, ignoring the damage they do to people and planet.
I'm anti-capitalist.