Since my previous post on Gaza, an almighty row has erupted about the BBC's refusal to air an appeal from the Disaster's Emergency Committee for humanitarian aid for Gaza. I can quite understand that some see this issue as the BBC putting its airy idealism ahead of the suffering of innocent civilians. But (though clearly I have huge sympathy for the Gazan cause, and will certainly be sending a donation) I have to agree entirely with their decision. I do appreciate Director General Mark Thompson's argument that the BBC "could not broadcast a free-standing appeal, no matter how carefully constructed, without running the risk of reducing public confidence in the BBC's impartiality in its wider coverage of the story."

The attack on the BBC seems to me to misread the balance of arguments on either side. On the one hand, it is not as if by failing to show the advert the amount raised by the appeal is going to be significantly reduced (and, ironically, the row has perhaps led to greater publicity than one advert could ever have gained). In the wider context, not much would be gained by showing the advert on the BBC, given that it will already receive extensive coverage on other television channels. On the other hand, the BBC would have much to lose if the BBC was felt to be becoming impartial in its reporting. As it stands, the BBC has been exceptionally effective at reporting from the conflict zone, given the logistical difficulties placed in its way by Israel, and it is this reporting - as much as the actual facts on the ground - that has massaged public sympathies for the greater humanitarian good.

Finally, Members of Parliament such as Nick Clegg have argued that "It's an insult to the viewing public to suggest they can't distinguish between the humanitarian needs of thousands of children and families in Gaza and the political sensitivities of the Middle East." Taking a look at the BBC message boards during the original conflict, though, and it's quite clear that a large number of viewers were already attacking the BBC for being too pro-Palestinian - and it is not at all clear that these viewers would have been able to distinguish between the universal humanitarian objective served by airing the appeal, and the political inference that the BBC was nudging its way ever more to the liberal extreme by doing so. What level of discrimination and nuance is there in a comment like this one:

No amount of spin by BBC and its allies will make terrorism anything other than pure and simple murder of innocents. Calling them "freedom fighters" or anything
else is simply disgusting. Shame on you, BBC.

I could not find where on the BBC website the word "freedom fighters" was used directly to describe Hamas, but clearly the "viewing public" patronised by Clegg are better readers than I am. How about this other commentator? Do you think he or she would distinguish between the BBC's humanitarian sensitivity and its political bias:

I find it difficult to understand why the BBC and other news channels broadcast this non-stop, but don't even pay lip service to the number of rockets which have been persistently fired at Israel.

Quite clearly the BBC stated the number of rockets being fired, and the number of Israeli casualties. But if even absolute details like this can be ignored by such a vehement public, do we really think that the more subtle issue of the appeal will be responded to thoughtfully? On the basis of this commentator, who is unable to avoid stereotyping in broad brush strokes, we ought not to be hopeful:

The European left wing can't stand Jews defending themselves.They love the pacifist Jews who quietly walked into the showers - but can't stand it when Jews fight back.I just hope Israeli politicians realise that the protests from Europe are mainly by the large Muslim population and awful left wing groups.People of sound mind are standing with you Israel. We are aware of the biased media in Europe. We are aware of the BBC's pro-Palestinian bias.

I culled these comments in just a five minute survey of the boards. In that time, I did not find one comment that praised the BBC for its balanced coverage. So the BBC is right to stick to its principles and not show the DEC appeal. If it shows it, this will only bolster the case for those who condemn its alleged pro-Palestinian bias, but conversely no one will celebrate the showing of the appeal as evidence of the BBC's objectivity. The BBC has too much to lose, and not much to be gained.

I listened to the radio this morning, and heard a BBC correspondent interviewing a Gazan mother who lost nine of her family, four of them her children, in an Israeli air strike. It appears that the munition used was white phosphorous, the use of which is legal on the open battlefield as a smokescreen, but which is not permitted for use as an assault weapon in areas where civilians are likely to be.

The woman, remarkably calm, recounts how each of her children died. I saw him decapitated, she explains of her eldest. Her second died of smoke inhalation. Her youngest, she says, "melted in my arms."

What brutal poetry this phrase conceals. Echoes of Hamlet thinking of death here - "Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve into a due." But, as Adorno said, after the Holocaust poetry becomes impossible. And to perceive any poetry in this phrase seems equally inappropriate. For one is left to imagine - or to try to imagine - what it must be like to be a mother looking at your child in your arms as they simply melt away, vanish, cease to exist, life slipping out as easily as water down a drain.

Of course, these metaphors too are not appropriate. For they do not capture the other sensations that must have surrounded this moment that the woman's phrase eloquently conceals: the smell of charred flesh, the smashing of glass and the crumbling of rubble, white smoke, a chemical agent sticking to the skin and burning white hot and, around, little bits of felt silently fluttering down from the sky, each one a packet containing more lethal fire.

It is hard to know what to say about the Israeli action that has not already been expressed by the media, at least in European newspapers and television (the recent London Review of Books carries elequoent disavowals of the Israeli action, by scores of academics). Whilst news organisations have striven to be impartial, beyond a certain point objectivity has to tip into compassion and anger on the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the border. When 1200 Palestinians (about a third of them children) die in response to a dozen Israeli deaths, the dynamics of the war as one of retaliation - as Israel sees it - simply does not work. Israel, the world's fourth largest military power, has lost the moral conflict.

The use of white phosphorous, the shells of which bear the stamps of the American factories in which they were produced, has become iconic of this new mood. Given that the Gaza strip is one of the most densely populated regions on Earth, it is pretty clear that it should not have been used. Now that Israel has admitted use of the munition, there will, of course, be an investigation by the army, who will no doubt find some middle-ranking officer to use as a scapegoat, whilst keeping Olmert and his generals free from blame for planning to use such a weapon. There will, of course, be more impartial investigations by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the United Nations, the findings of which will be breezily dismissed, whilst the shells still make their way from Lockheed and Boeing factories in the States to land in the homes of civilian women melting children (future terrorists!) out of existence.

Cynicism aside, one is left with just one hope. This is that another, balance has tipped, one which has its long end half a century ago, and which has ensured that no matter how Israel levered its military might, the balance of international opinion would never tip into condemnation. Previous Israeli actions, from the 1967 war to the recent Lebanon conflict have, been conducted under the cloud of the Holocaust. For every Hamas rocket attack on Israel, the rest of the world could not attack Israeli policies because it was still assailed by the guilt of World War Two. Now, however, opinion seems, perhaps, to have shifted. The repressed has returned for the last time, so perhaps now for the first time, it is possible to be anti-Israeli without this having the faint whiff of anti-Semitism. We must now be willing to stand defiant and say of Israel that, whilst terrorism is something to which they have the right to respond, we have the right to say: "enough."

I have just caught the end of a piece on the radio about the popularity of the new e-book readers over Christmas. One of the commentators suggested that the key problem with them is that you cannot read with them in the bath. This reiterates a complaint I first heard from Margaret Atwood, and have heard a couple of other times since. So it seems like the Luddites are singing to a common tune in their wash rooms: if you cannot scrub your back in the bathtub whilst reading War and Peace, one of life's little pleasures has been lost.

But, I ask you, have you ever taken a book to the bath with you? The thought of all those bubbles mixing with the pages of a paperback to give a soap-stained Oliver Twist, or of adding to Anna Karina's miseries by sopping her in dirty water, puts me off. Get too absorbed by Gissing, and you too might join grubby street by forgetting to scrub your armpits. And who has baths in these environmentally conscious and time-pressed days anyway? Perhaps the tune should change: e-book readers will never catch on unless you can take them paragliding over the dusty Sahara without them breaking if you drop them in the sand.

It is still dark when I set off, at around 7.00 in the morning, and a thick sugar of frost coats the ground. Though probably about minus 5, I am warm in my new Christmas gifts of a Merino wool base layer, and a fleece. Luckily, also, the track out to the farm is rutted and stony, and affords better grip than the greased tarmac of roads and pavements, and I walk quickly, hurrying to find a good spot before the dawn behind me finally breaks above the brow of Quarrington hill. Ahead of me the track remains a dark line, and I check behind me every now and then to see the pinkish light concentrated in the east, but meekly failing to break through and spread itself more generally across this morning world. At what point will that light colour change and shift, at once rapidly and yet somehow imperceptibly? At what precise moment does the vague gauze of oranges and pinks tip into daylight? I know that taking photographs at this time of day is the most difficult, because everything changes so fast, and a scene that looks good in one light has vanished by the time you can get your camera out. Happily, I have with me another Christmas gift, a Lowepro Fastpack, which allows me to carry all my gear and yet reach it by just swinging the bag from my shoulder. And so I can walk onwards, enjoying the remainder of the concealing night, confident that the moment a glance back shows me a good scene, I will be able to stop and shoot on the spot.

As I reach a line of trees, I see some possibility, and brush my way through tall grass, crumbling ice away as I pass, to reach a fence on which I can lean. Taking my camera out, I realise that if darkness is the enemy of the photographer - for without light, nothing can happen - the cold it often brings is his most able footsoldier. For it is only once I remove my gloves to fiddle with zips and buttons that I realise how cold it is. Otherwise snug in my layers, my fingers now tell me by their sluggishness that I need to get moving soon.



So I rather too hurridly dash off a few snaps, and set of again. It is only once I get back home that I realise that in my haste I have forgotten to check that the vibration reduction, essential for shooting in this poor light, was switched on. The blurry fringes of the trees in this image therefore tell the photographic weather.

Colour is now starting to smudge into the world. Firstly the grey greens of the fields, and then a rust of dead bracken. As I pass hedgerows, I amusedly set off anxious flurries of wings and leaves. But as I creep past the farm, and see the breakfast table through the lit window, with silhouettes cast against the walls, I feel somehow guilty. For what reason do I have to be out here, two miles from the nearest village, at this time of the morning, as others are only just getting up. I mentally note good reason for getting a dog number 36 - for of course dog walkers have an excuse at being about before the work day has begun. As it is, though, I wonder whether I dare, if challenged, admit that I am going out shooting - before revealing that my ammunition is a light sensitive electronic square, rather than a gun cartridge. Humour usually being at its most depleted at this time of day, I suspect that I would not dare be so witty, and just mumble something and be cast as a harmless hobbiest.

Anyway, I now hurry onwards, and find another half-shot in what is by now a duller half-light. I pause to watch a pair of squirrels squabble high in a pine tree. Their machine gun chatter seems somehow anachronistic in the quiet, but it is hard to tell whether they are really being agressive, or whether they are just circusing around, swinging and scurrying about the branches. It is with the gasp of the big tent audience that I see one of the squirrels suddenly lose his grasp and plumment, flailing, about thirty feet to the ground. I do not see him land, though I hear a thud. It is with relief that a long ten seconds later I see him scurry up the trunk again, to resume combat.

When I reach the ponds, it is not surprising that they are glassed with inch-thick ice. With the sun just now glowing in the background, the silhouettes, textures and washed-out colours in the scene are worth capturing.





But it is the details around about that are most interesting. Frost changes the natural world into a sharpened version of itself, setting off shapes and tracing lines of leaves with thin shards of ice.



After tarrying about the ponds with my camera out and gloves off, I am forced to move again. Just as I put my camera away, there is a rustle in the bushes ahead, and then not more than ten yards in front, two roe deer burst from cover and run across the path, leaping across the fence into the woods on the other side. I have often seen deer elsewhere on this walk, but never down by the ponds or this low in the woods, so I keep extra alert as I follow the path through the woods, looking out for further signs. Of course, now that I have my long lens out, I see or hear nothing. But instead I have time to muse that the last time I went this route, the bluebells were out, whereas today brown is the dominant colour on the wood floor.



However, it is easier going now, with the ground forged to an iron hardness by months of cold, that in spring, when showers turn it muddy underfoot. Soon I am retracing my steps back towards home, where the main road is now a buzz of commuter traffic. My day, too, starts, though I do appreciate the irony that as I sit at my computer, with the central heating having been turned off after its morning burst, I am colder indoors than I was out, where, bitter though the air was, I walked into my own warmth.