{"id":2343,"date":"2018-07-01T19:26:37","date_gmt":"2018-07-01T18:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/?p=2280"},"modified":"2019-01-10T12:21:55","modified_gmt":"2019-01-10T12:21:55","slug":"yiota","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/2018\/07\/01\/yiota\/","title":{"rendered":"Yiota"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I am remembering my old friend Panayiota Pastra \u2014 Yiota to everyone \u2014 who died a year ago today.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Yiota in Glasgow in 1997<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I am remembering my old friend Panayiota Pastra \u2014 Yiota to everyone \u2014 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 … Continue reading “Yiota”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2343"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2374,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions\/2374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}