Tender times on the tarmac

Overlit airports are soulless places through which we irritably rush on our way to catch a plane, or when we are exhausted after a horrible flight.

There is little time for a coffee or shopping, and usually far less time to notice anybody else.

But occasionally you're forced to stop and wait. The plane is late or your timing is right, or wrong, depending on how much you hate waiting around. And if you're not caught up with the morning paper, or with running after errant children to save them from the clutches of child traffickers, you'll start to notice, despite an ugly setting of bricks and mortar, stories of beauty.

I don't easily cry, but I often wipe my eyes as I watch the unedited joy of grannies meeting grandchildren for the first time, or of children rushing to jump into the arms of a returning parent. When a couple kiss after some time apart, it is fun to judge for how long, and how happily, they have been together. The more passionate the embrace, the newer their relationship, you imagine. Watching as adult children are welcomed home after gap years and rites of passage by parents struggling to restrain themselves makes my heart ache.

"Airports are places of extreme emotion where people come and go and experiences begin and end," best-selling author, Tony Parson once said.

Last year he was a writer-in-residence at London's international Heathrow airport, where he researched his book Departures: Seven Stories from Heathrow.

Airports remind us of what really matters. While stuck on the pavement outside the OR Tambo arrivals terminal one night recently, I quickly got over my irritation about not having had any money to pay for my parking, and at being late for whatever it was I had to do. I had to call my husband to bring some notes and for that to happen I had a long wait.

But it was a pleasant wait as I watched. There was such tenderness on that grubby Johannesburg tarmac.

Everything we do, everything politicians do, everything anybody does is to multiply and facilitate these interactions. We shouldn't get distracted by greed and power.