I can’t remember much of the flight – its innards if you like. I was told that in Spanish the word migas is for the soft part of bread. The middle part surrounded by the crust. Do we have a word for that? It’s what I need now to describe the missing part of the flight in my mind, or if not missing then out of focus, getting out of the way when I try and look at it. Not that anything happened on the flight. I think. The outsides of the experience I recall. At the boarding gate, waiting for the plane to taxi up to the window. Wondering if the plane would be in a hurry – it was already an hour delayed – and would taxi too quickly, bashing into the window, killing us all or maiming at least/ at worst.

At the other end of the flight waiting for my passport to be checked I smiled at the border control agent. She had an unemotional face. I wondered if I’d be trusted and let through to go home. She held the pages of my passport up to the light. No-one’s done that before. When I went to America I had to give a fingerprint, but I couldn’t press my finger down hard enough. The border control man there shouted, ‘Harder, harder,’ at me.

Maybe I wore my anxieties on my face. My worry about the plane taxing into the window of the boarding gate and also – here’s a memory – on the flight I was seated by an emergency exit. ‘Are you okay with that?’ a flight attendant asked me and the woman sitting next to me. We both nodded, I more from stupidity. I can’t answer direct questions.

I began to fear a mid-air explosion, or collision. I began to worry that I wouldn’t be strong enough to perform the required wresting of the emergency door from its hinges. I began to worry that I wouldn’t remember the instructions for dismantling the emergency door.

The plane was late. It was behind schedule. The pilot told us that a passenger had been ill in Portugal. They’d had to wait for an ambulance. We weren’t to worry. He could take us to London in half the time it would normally take. The plane banked. And banked again. I thought it’d turn upside down.

Maybe I read a little. Maybe I slept a little. When I was little I was carried from a plane in the arms of a running parent. I vomited on the runway.

It is magical, though. The moment when the aircraft leaps into the air. Someone told me that an aeroplane isn’t ‘flying’ it’s just moving forward faster than it’s falling.

I like to look out of the window of aeroplanes. To see the land underneath become abstract polygons. As we approached England I thought I recognised the shape of the coast from weather maps I’d seen on tele. Looking out is better on the way home. Seeing alien plains or mountains below you is good and exciting, but coming home is better. Waves in the sea look like spilled salt.

I’m sure there’s nothing I could do to prevent the plane crashing if there were a fault. A young voice behind me said, ‘Oh good. I like to sit on the wings. I feel safer.’

There’s nothing any of us passengers could do.

The ocean would be cold. We would have to pull a toggle to inflate the life jacket – but not too early. Only once we’re in the water. Then we can use a light to signal our position. The impersonal ‘we’. I’d be on my own. I’d use a light to signal my position. I imagined the woman next to me sinking under the water. I’d try to pull her up but her clothes’d be sodden and the combined weight too heavy for me. The flight attendant wanted us to keep our shoes on because we were in an emergency exit. And she took our bags from us. ‘They have to be stowed overhead if you’re in the emergency exit,’ she said. I thought that if we crashed into the sea I’d kick my shoes off. But I would miss my bag if we went into the sea. It has my passport in it, how would they identify me?

I’m thinking about this on the train from the airport. The landing was fine. The earth accepted us. The passenger sitting next to me had said, ‘What an awful landing. The worst I have experienced.’ She said it the long way, without a contraction (I’ve), ‘The worst I have experienced.’

I said, ‘I think it was because he was in a hurry. He was going fast.’ The passenger nodded.

Here’s another thing that happened. As we prepared for take-off, the cabin crew told us that there was someone on board with a severe nut allergy. We wouldn’t be able to buy nuts from them and we were warned not to eat our own nuts. The passengers laughed – ribaldry, aftermath of stag party groups. The passenger next to me said, ‘Why can’t we eat nuts?’

I said, ‘Because the air is recycled, I think.’

She shook her head as if to say, ‘This world!’