I lost my temper on Twitter the other week.

It had been a long day on a delayed train. I was sat in a hotel room while DorkySon slept and DorkyDad was out at work, and I was whiling away the time online. On one tab, I had the Guardian live feed of events in Gaza, and on another tab I had Twitter, where it seemed like half the people I follow were getting all excited about I’m A Celebrity, and the other half were taking part in a sponsored discussion about Christmas presents.

What I should probably have done is turned the iPad off and gone to sleep, but I couldn’t. The rage had arrived.

‘Why are you all ignoring this?’ I tweeted.

‘Why is no-one talking about Gaza? What has to happen before we start paying attention to this? How many children have to be killed before we’re outraged?’

I ranted on for a while, before finally giving up and turning the lights out. Perhaps luckily, I then spent ten days offline while we were on holiday.

But the questions have been rumbling around in my mind ever since and I’ve been trying to find a way to write about them in more detail. It is hard. I have started this post several times and deleted it because what I’ve written doesn’t seem adequate. I have a deeply emotional response to the situation without having the extensive background knowledge to make every argument in as perfect and coherent a way as I would like.

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