Today I am remembering my old friend Panayiota Pastra — Yiota to everyone — who died a year ago today.
We met when we were neighbours in Walley Range, Manchester, in the mid-nineties. She was a postgrad student at UMIST and I had been working for software companies in south Manchester for a couple of years. We would often sit in her flat drinking Greek-style coffee and just talking. She took me to bars where there was good ouzo and you had to shout over the noise of crowds of Greek people good-naturedly arguing with each other. I took her up Mam Tor on a very windy day. We cooked meals for each other (badly I’m sure, for my part, and expertly for hers) and she introduced me to Robert Frost.
When she moved to Glasgow to do her PhD, I drove her there with all her possessions. I visited a number of times before she moved on again to France, and then back to Greece. And we kept in touch over the years; first by letter and then in that strange, disconnected way that the internet makes possible. She went on to become a highly-regarded academic and teacher, eventually moving back to the UK. Then she told me she was ill, and a few email exchanges later she was gone. She left a husband and a young family.
She was a good and brave and dear friend at a difficult time in my life. And then a more distant but no-less important internet friend for a large span of my adult years. I miss her.
