An entry from our Summer Reading competition.

YOU are wearing thongs. It is only November, but hot and hazy with a humidity that hits you as soon as you leave the house. 

You cross the grey brick driveway littered with jacaranda flowers, their pale mauve squashed by feet and car tyres, being harassed by hungry bees.

The truth is that you love this time of year.

The sun is warm and sultry when it is cloudy, and the full force of summer is ahead, not here yet. 

• People fret over first world problems while wars rage across the world, including the Gaza-Israel conflict (above).

There’s a feeling of approaching holidays and impending relaxation, the festivities that help us move toward the slow winding down of another year.

Getting into your car you remember that you have forgotten your mobile phone and go back inside to get it. 

Arriving at the café you also remember you have forgotten your keep-cup, deciding it is too late to drive the five minutes back home to find it waiting on your kitchen bench.

Your local shopping centre is having a mini upgrade, trying to compete with the brand-new airport hangar sized corporate supermarket recently finished opposite. They’ve decided to re-paint the outside a creamy green – a colour all the fashion now, apparently – and to install a big front portico with new signage.

You bypass the building under construction and slip in through the café’s side door. It’s business as usual despite the noisy building interruptions and half-closed look.

While sipping your coffee you realise the newspaper holds the latest depressing fiasco that is Israel’s answer to Hamas’s atrocities, their own atrocious bombing and blitzing of Gaza. 

Hard to read. You wonder what you can do to stop the carnage and realise: nothing. 

The same with Putin’s ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It’s awful when you realise that these atrocities will be read by future generations the way you studied WWI and WWII as a teenager in your high school textbooks. 

You wondered then, what it would have been like living through those times, now unfortunately you know.

And here you are safe in one of the most isolated places in the world. 

You can’t really know what it is like for those who are not. 

Still, you grieve for them.

You buy white nectarines, now less than $10 a kilo, at last. 

Only a few weeks ago the first season ones were up at $24. 

You look for bread, but they don’t have the sort that you like. 

Oh, how spoilt you are, living here with such abundance and choice! You worry for those without food today or without enough. 

You grieve for those being blown up going to the shop to buy supplies. 

Or just trying to find somewhere safe. 

That long dusty tired walk to the south of Gaza, carrying what little you now own, to then be bombed again in what was supposed to be a safe place.

You just want it to stop. You want there to be a ceasefire, at the very least.

But world affairs are not something you have control over.

All you have control over today is what you will buy: nectarines and bread. You have your five white nectarines but what kind of bread?

by SHELLEY JAMES