Fighting on a plane is not a good idea – and I should know | Zoe Williams

I was getting off a plane the other week, having returned from Iceland, when I had an altercation. The woman in front of me was getting her stuff together, and I reckoned I could get past her. Trust me on this, you could have got an ambulance through that space. I only did an “excuse me” whisper as a reflex; if it had been, say, a tube train, I would have sauntered past. “No!” she said, at roughly the volume and with about the same level of harshness that you would use for a dog that has just leapt into a pram and is about to maul a baby. “You. Can. Wait.”

My rational brain could register that she was American and still had her sleeping pillow on and, therefore, Reykjavík had probably been a stopover on a long-haul flight, rather than a two-hour hop. So, maybe she had not slept very well and, consequently, this exchange didn’t mean much. Also, I wasn’t even in a rush. That rational brain would have said nothing. All my irrational brain could see, though, was a very small space in which I was trapped with a mortal foe, so I did what anyone in fear for their life would do. I muttered: “Well, that was a bit aggressive,” and waited, my heart beating a tattoo, as if I were the last coward left in the trench.

Anyway, I was telling Mr Z about it, on a different plane, when he got into an altercation of his own. The guy on his other side, at roughly the volume etc you would use on a convicted criminal who had escaped from prison and, still in his stripy pyjamas, was openly shoplifting, interrupted: “Stop leaning on me. Lean on your wife!”. Then he said it again, a few more times. At the risk of sounding loyal, there probably was a space issue between those two seats, and Mr Z definitely was not the cause of it. What I wanted to say was: “You can’t interrupt a story about a plane fight with a new plane fight. Where do you think you are, in an episode of Seinfeld?” Instead, I said nothing at all, being in existential peril, what with the very small space and the mortal foe. They talk about the fight-or-flight cortisol response; fight- on -flight is a whole new level.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist