'That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time' 
(John Stuart Mill)

As soon as I walked in the front door I could tell that I was in the of a cheerfully eclectic obsessive. The cosy flat in Gibson Gardens was crammed with a staggering collection of distinctly classy objets - vintage pinball machines, an old juke box, mechanical curiosities, robots, toys, wooden animals (a particularly fetching penguin), old pictures, memorabilia, books, albums, drums, a fish tank, and that was only the front room. The bathroom looked like an exhibit from the London Dungeon. I sat down in the only chair, narrowly missing the cats, and was offered tea by Pinball Geoff and his partner, dancer Marie Louise. Geoff (real name Geoffrey Roland Harvey) - an amiable, engaging fella and an entertaining raconteur - fell in love with pinball machines on a trip to Jersey when he was 14. 

Thirty-four years later, the affair remains a passionate one. The couple had just returned from a holiday in Spain and, passing through Perpignan station, Geoff whiled the time away by rattling up, in front of a couple of goggle-eyed French schoolkids, the highest score ever recorded on the station's pinball machine.

By the time Geoff was 15, he had ten wooden pinball machines in his bedroom and, with no room for a bed, he slept under these, to him, iconic creations. To pay for this unfolding romance, he left Highgate School in the afternoons to hustle pinball at the Golden Goose in Leicester Square, parting tourists from their money. 

After walking out of school one day never to return ('I couldn't stand it'), he took a succession of pinball related jobs, but a 'real' day job beckoned. Armed with a CQSW in Social Work, he became a psychiatric social worker at a drug unit in City Road, then at a needle exchange. Out of the blue, he received a call from Madame Tussaud's and left the world of social work to become probably the world's first fulltime 'pinball consultant' at the company's Rock n' Roll Circus.

'I was interviewed in front of full-size robotic models of the Beatles', recalls Geoff. 'They couldn't find Ringo's head so they stuck on Winston Churchill's instead. Then they started playing, Winston's head and cigar jerking in time to 'Please Please Me'. It was bizarre'.

After Tussaud's, he set up a company, Full Tilt, renting and selling pinball machines, and then he established The Pinball Machine Company. He bought a 1958 Austin Princess Van der Plas hearse to ferry around the machines - 'It was perfect. You could slide them in the back door and they wouldn't move about'. Flashed down by a following car early one morning, Geoff feared the worst. It turned out to be a producer of a Channel 4 series on British eccentrics. Geoff became a TV star.

Business was good, until the popularity of video games and computers saw the pinball market enter a decline in the mid-1990s. 'My partner and I used to draw a downward, 45-degree straight line on our profit margins', says Geoff, and they closed the company down. Geoff then went into business for himself. Currently, he owns 180 machines, with 100 stored in a farm building near Billericay Cricket Club (don't ask) and 80 in his workshop off Stoke Newington High Street.

The machines at the workshop have to compete for space with an assortment of drum kits, motorbikes - including a 1968 Harley, a Moto Guzzi and a classic BSA - and other items, such as Mary Louise's Beetle costume (again, don't ask). He now makes a living repairing, hiring out, restoring and customising pinball machines.

'Where do you find them?' I ask. 'They find me', he replies, explaining that, when he sells them - a typical machine from the 1960s and 1970s starts at £700 - he'll often find himself buying the same ones back a few years later. However, he admits that 'I can't bear to sell them, really. I have to like someone first. I have a sliding price scale depending on how much I like them'. Reluctant vendor he may be, but he has an impressive client list, including recent commissions from, among others, Bacardi and 'comedian' Frank Skinner. He was also asked by the BBC's 'On the Record' programme to illustrate the differing Tory and Labour views on Europe, a pinball machine serving as a streetwise swingometer.

As one would expect from a self-defined 'creative psychotic', Geoff has other interests in his life, chief among which is drumming. He can often be found sitting in local venues with famed Stokey funsters The Bikini Beach Band ('I'm the oldest surviving member. I used to dress up as a gay biker when we played Madame Jo Jo's'), rock n'rollers The Witchdoktors, Luxury Condo and Ruby Throat.

A long-time resident of Stoke Newington, he finds the area has become increasingly conformist and complacent over the last few years but, nonetheless, there remains 'a diversity of delightfully eccentric people here'. With free spirits like Pinball Geoff around the place, this state of affairs will happily continue.

Geoff is playing with The Witchdoktors at The Eye on 30 October. Marie Louise is appearing in 'Limelight & Lunacy' and 'Better Red Than Dead', a double bill of physical theatre and dance, on 5 and 6 November at Oh! art, Oxford House, Derbyshire St, Bethnal Green E2 6HG (020 7739 9001).