In airports, I remember many things that could easily be forgotten. Waiting for a flight allows all sorts of thoughts to drift to the surface, thoughts that might not have seen daylight for years. I like the transitional zone of a departures lounge, stripped of local flavour. I usually arrive hours before I need to. It allows me to relax and to roam around a place that doesn't really feel like anywhere, even though these spaces connect us with the entire world.

Today, I'm thinking of the title of a video game review I saw in a magazine when I was about ten years old. For some reason, the title stood out for me at the time, and I can remember it to this day: 'Splash Acid Blood All Over the Shop'. The review, from PC Gamer, was discussing the first-person shooter Aliens vs Predator. I suspect if I played it today it would still make me jump. The aliens move at an uncanny speed. They come spilling out of air ducts and access doors and grates in the ceiling and floor. It was one of the first games I remember in which the threat can come from any direction imaginable. You are given a motion tracker, which pings when something is sensed moving up ahead, or you can switch on night vision, helping you see more clearly in the game's almost endless dark. Of course, you can't have both at the same time.

The title of the review refers to the blood of a xenomorph, the technical name for the aliens in question. The blood is dull yellow in colour and highly corrosive. Shoot a xenomorph from too close a range and the splashback will burn through your virtual skin in seconds. These xenomorphs have many memorable characteristics, but their acid blood is a stroke of sci-fi genius. In Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), the first film in what would become a lucrative franchise, the passengers of the Nostromo marvel and despair at the blood's ability to eat through several successive layers of their spaceship. To cut the alien open means risking a fatal breach of the ship's hull.

When I am sitting on the plane, a single drop of water, cool and clear, falls on my hand. I look up, but there is no obvious leak and no further droplets. I haven't imagined it. The bead of water is there on my hand, still and cold, as I look for its source.

In the row ahead, a mother sings a repeating pattern of words, not really a melody, more of a rhythm, to calm their child. We hit a patch of turbulence as we begin our descent. There's the clunk of something being withdrawn into the fuselage, or being extended, some mechanical process upon which, I suspect, a great deal depends.

For a minute or so the Channel is visible beneath us, before England's tightly farmed land takes over. There are strange, marble patterns on the sea, almost white, too static to be waves, and before I can work out what they might be they stop, and beyond them the water seems filled with vast brown clouds, roiling under the surface, and then a narrow beach, so thin it's barely there, and then the green blandness of fields and towns.

I tell myself that, when we land, one of the first things I'll do is look up whether the video game review still exists somewhere other than my head. I'd like to see the title again. 'Splash Acid Blood All Over the Shop'. I doubt there's a trace of it; it may never even have existed online. There could be a few copies of the magazine left, physically intact but forgotten, surviving simply through having been overlooked - tucked into the dead, damp corners of bookshelves, waiting in uncleared attics, faded but not yet shredded or dissolved. I suspect the writer of the article would think it strange I'm writing this. They might not even be alive. They probably are. They might not care.

There are clouds on the horizon that, at a glance, could be land, but they're too high to be land. I look at the upturned wing of our plane, at the image of a winged horse, bright gold on a white background. In the seat in front of me, the child screams. His mother keeps on singing.