BBC Radio Leicester’s football commentator Ian Stringer has been in Tokyo this last week ready to take part in tomorrows Tokyo Marathon and last Wednesday morning Tokyo Fox made an appearance on the station’s breakfast show presented by Jonathan Lampon. Having got in touch via the medium of Twitter a few weeks ago we continued to exchange quite a few mails and I said I’d be more than happy to help him out on his trip here so we agreed to meet up outside Harajuku station that morning.

We wandered through the inner gardens which lead to the Meiji shrine chatting away excitedly and not really taking in the place too much. Before not too long Ian was telling me that he was going to do a feature piece for that mornings breakfast show. It was about 01.15am back in Britain so he needed to get it recorded and mailed back to the radio station ready for use which was done via the help of McDonalds wi-fi!!

Anyway, part of the recording featured an interview with me which I was a bit worried about as my voice isn’t so radio friendly! Using the voice memo on his phone, he just started recording and began to set the scene a few metres away from me and then suddenly I was being asked a few questions about why I supported Leicester City, my hometown, my reasons for being in Tokyo, life in Japan, the places I was gonna take him after the interview, whether I was going to follow that nights big game against local rivals Nottingham Forest and so on. Beforehand, I had expected to freeze and not have much to say but I got into it and waffled on about all kinds of cr*p which surprised me. I have to say that I loved doing it and was buzzing afterwards as we exited the park.

I didn’t actually get to hear it back till a couple of days later and though a bit strange and cringeworthy at times, I did love it, particularly the reaction of the presenter afterwards. It took a while for me to realise that he was just reading the words Ian had sent him in his accompanying mail which were jokingly dictated by myself!

With my parents being avid Radio Leicester listeners, I have grown up listening to the station when in their presence which was of course quite often! As a lifelong Leicester City fan I have naturally always followed their football output so I was delighted to meet up with the guy who is doing what I, and many others, consider to be the dream job! Typically, my parents missed the show that morning which was a shame as I’d have loved for them to hear me coming out of their radio.

Thankfully, these days we can quite easily catch-up with what we miss so if you did miss it then you can listen again to it here. I’m featured at 7.27am which is 1 hour 27 into the programme but please be aware that this link will not work after February 26th as BBC content is only available for a week.