Over the years I have arrived at Jan Smuts Airport and Johannesburg International Airport, today it's OR Tambo International. It's not just the name - and the concept of South Africa - which changes each time I fly into Joburg, it's the airport. They have been improving it for a long time and it's like being a dream, really: I know exactly where I am and yet not at all.
When I first came to South Africa I was seven and my mother's sister picked us up from the airport. Since then someone has always picked me up at this airport: my aunt, my sister, a BBC employees when I flew in a couple of days after Kate died, but not today. Today I am here alone and it should be a pleasure, for me, to be between an international flight and an internal one: a place of no responsibility or ability to do much about anything, like being on a plane only you can walk around. But this airport is full of the ghosts of the people who are not meeting me or not flying with me. It's not even that fabulous When Harry Met Sally situation where a lover no longer picks you up at the airport, your relationship having move onto that point... there is simply no one to pick me up because I am flying on to Durban for the first show tomorrow night.
At the same time it's lovely to be here - I can feel the beautiful heat through the air con, can see the sunshine on the tarmac outside and I am diverted by spending some time trying to find the right check-in desk for my flight to Durban. Wandering around, looking the tourist, I get approached by two guys who point in the other direction, telling me check in is there. I thank them and do not break my stride. They are pretty snarly at my not accepting their offer of help. Ah, being at an airport, looking like a tourist....
Of course the tension ratchets right up again as I see my check in desk and stand in the queue. I am overweight. Well, I am overweight, but that's not important right now. The problem is that my luggage is overweight to the tune of about 7kg. I try to arrange some stuff under my jacket on the trolley. Then it's my turn. My strategy, as with every other nanosecond of my life, is to talk. I mean, as if there is any way I could really distract someone from their job by yakking at them, but I am nervous and maybe we might get on and he'll feel sorry for me. As it turns out he doesn't even bother with my weight and I engage him in conversation anyway, telling him G's story. He really feels for G and we agree that addiction is a terrible thing.
I approach a group of workers having a sit down and ask whether there is a coffee shop in domestic departures and it is only as I am about to go through security (just past the gun check-in point) that I realise they were giving me a funny look because my enormous trolley is all but empty. I see me as they see me: rather deranged.
Standing in the queue for security and passing through it suddenly I recognise it all quite clearly: nothing's changed here, I think, since I got on a flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town with my sister and my brother. It feels like yesterday but it is not yesterday, it is another lifetime. Suddenly I'm back with Charlie and Kate, staying in her best friend's spare room in Cape Town, the three of us spending the night beset by one mosquito after another, finding ourselves unable to sleep because of their noisy assault and then because of the hysteria the situation induces. I miss my sister, and I miss my brother, and I pretend for as long as I can that I am back there and then, not caught in this inadequate here and now.
Ah, it's the fear getting to me again. Flightside I have my first South African juice, get online and comfort myself with a bit of work. There are emails from Anna, our producer, and I don't feel so alone. Come on Rebecca, you're about to get on the plane to Durban where the tour begins: the actual tour of the actual show which Martin and you wrote... and you're bringing it back to one of its homes. It's all a bit surreal and at the same time too marvellous.
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