In Ibiza with Endless House

I had forgotten how much I love airports. Their soothing non-placeness. Where you can accidentally spend 50 pounds because it isn't real, it's an interzone. The way they always feel like someone you've met before but you can't quite remember their name. Like somebody you maybe even once loved, before they were put through a witness protection programme and a surgeon removed all identifying features from their face. Their face is a clear plastic mask now. I like it there. It's 8.30PM and there is one man in Pret a Manger, slowly paying by credit card for something cold. He has nice grey hair. Oh look, it's George Lamb.

The man on my row of the plane is smart, chiselled, says he goes to university in America, but lives with his brother in West London. He's carrying a hardback book, a baseball cap, a transatlantic accent and a future. The woman is a singer with some meetings to attend, she says. She says she met Rihanna's A&R once and didn't even know it was him, can you believe it, I can't believe it, can you believe it. She just listens to Bob Marley all day to make it all OK. "He was a Aquarius too, just like me. What are you, a Libra?"

He says he's a Virgo. She warns him not to be self-deprecating as Virgoans can really risk letting themselves down like that. He smiles his million-dollar smile and promises to try. Then the plane starts swaying as if we're starting the descent early. "What's wrong?" she says, taking his hand again, she just met him, what time is it, she's grabbing his watch, why are we going down early she wants to know this isn't the right time. "We're just experiencing a bit of turbulence," announces the captain. "Is everything OK?" she asks the man again. "Is everything OK?" she asks again, like a toddler. He doesn't answer her this time. "Is everything OK?" she asks other people on the plane. Yes, they nod. "Can I have some more wine?" she asks a passing steward. "Not now, no," they say.

For someone with so much faith in the stars, this girl is quite frightened of the sky.

Finally the man speaks again. "I hate Chris Brown," he says. "Oh, that's because he's poison! Sheer poison!" she replies. "Just like my boyfriend!" she says. Then the turbulence comes back. She reaches for his hand again but he has folded his arms so she pushes her hand down hard into her own thigh.

"I so need the toilet," she says later, "but I would never ever go to that toilet for a million pounds." I've never met a germophobe who was happy. It takes lot of energy to constantly remind yourself that danger lurks all around in the form of microscopic bacteria, invisible to the naked eye. Out to get your fingers and buttocks and kidneys at every turn. The unseen illnesses of everybody else. It exhausts me even to think about it. Germs are my friends.

"I really like Haim at the moment," she says. "They're three girls, on basses," she says, and mimes strumming a bass. "I'm a singer but I grew up listening to cheesy R&B, it's in my blood. And house music."

"House music's quite hard to do, isn't it?" asks the man whose life will never, ever go wrong. "House music is the easiest thing in the world to do!" she says. "You just take a line and sing it five times. So you go, 'I've been waiting all night so that you love me, so that you need me, so that you love me, so that you need me, so that you love me, so that you need me,' that's it, five times. Now you know how to sing house music!"

Outside the window, I look at the clouds, the sky is bleeding red like a raspberry ripple. I had forgotten the cast of casualties that populate Ibiza. I only ever remember the good bits but then you come back and here they are on the plane. Scared people, like her. Old ravers with sleeveless T-shirts, big beefy Ibeefa arms, tattoos that speak of legends past, civilisations already conquered. Their nostrils are on assisted living. Their suntans have got other families of suntans to support. Their freckles have joined the dots. The men's beer guts are kept in check by the constant threat of nudity, while their wives' eyebrows are committing bigamy. The beat keeps them going like a pacemaker. Maybe I'm an old raver now, too. The men in the row in front of us seem a bit smarter, bit more on the ball. One of them is putting his reading glasses on, having borrowed a book from his friend. The book is Rod Stewart's autobiography. Oh look, the man is Fatboy Slim.

The next night, I'm on the battlements of an old fort in Ibiza Town. It's 7PM and the sun is still warm but wait, is that the moon over there, as thin as an outline of paper? The vodka limon is sweet, tell yourself the sweetness comes from the fruit trees that cluster all round the island, and not a chemical lab. Down the hill in the white houses that all pile onto the hill, a woman is holding a baby like a bag of rubbish being taken out. She's talking happily to a policeman. Evening sunshine makes you rich.

Where I'm standing, the warm-up DJs are playing endless house. Endless, endless, house. Electric bongos, that's how it sounds. Repetitive beats that only tease out a vague glimpse of melody every ten minutes or so, just to remind you that pleasures less hard-won than this exist. They call us the generation of instant gratification but this kind of house music makes you wait so long that when the tune finally comes in, it's like the singer's decided to fake an orgasm just to move things along a bit. Like the girl on the plane said, the same thing sung five times. It reminds me a bit of a British man I once met in Hong Kong who said he'd been living on a beach in Thailand with a prostitute for a month.

He said the first time it's alright, then you buy them some food, rent a beach hut for the month, move them in with you. The second night they do it with a bit more feeling and you buy them some more food. You smoke some weed together and each day they do it a bit more, you know. "You know!" He was working on a construction site in Hong Kong, on one of the new shining towers of finance that was going up. The palaces of international banking, scaffolding made from bamboo, workers used to fall from it and die all the time until they banned it. He was saving up on this building job for a few months and then he'd be back to Thailand, back to the beach, hiring another girl and smoking some more weed, once more with feeling.

The girl on the plane got led away at the airport by a man who said he felt responsible for her because he was in the same industry. He said he wanted to look after her. He had a nice smile. I hope she was OK.

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood

Previously – I Went to the Top of the Shard and Felt Feelings