I met Richard when we were both working at an English-language primary school in Fukuoka, Japan. He was in the middle of an amazing engineering project at the time – building his own R2-D2. As part of my job at the Observer magazine, I edited a weekly feature called ‘What does this say about me?’ written by Miranda Sawyer (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/what-does-this-say-about-me) So of course I gave Richard a call.

Read Miranda’s take on Richard and his droid here and see more photographs of the pair roaming around Fukuoka, taken by Chris Willson, here.