Wherever he goes, John Barry, a 60-year-old ex-soldier/officer, known to his fellow enthusiasts as 'Mr Flyblown', gets the blue carpet treatment.
The hum of a bluebottle (Calliphora vomitoria), the drone of a housefly (Musca domestica) are music to his ears, and earlier this month – frustrated by the nation's failure to recognise the importance of fly extermination in society – he opened the first museum dedicated entirely to them.
Visitors have been turning up to the exhibition iin his home outside Portsmouth, in numbers he can't quite explain.
Perhaps they come because bluebottle obsession is a more widely-suffered condition than previously suspected.
Or because John's love for the flat variety is so deep, genuine and, in its way, touching. Or, maybe, it is because he's the kind of man around whom there's always a buzz.
"I've been fascinated by flies since I was a small boy," he says, sitting in a work room writhing with latest swatter development.
"My mum probably thought I'd grow out of it, but once I got my hands on our our budgie she agreed to let me swat flies instead and I knew I never wanted to let go.
When I went to the middle east, it was fly swatting heaven and that is where I was recognised by the Guiness Book of Records - although it was with my left hand that I did all the work!"
John Barry was eight, and desperate to kill flies of his own, when he spotted a ‘Red Fly Gobbler 800’ lying on a rubbish dump. "I took it home, wiped all the muck off it, plugged it in, and it worked," he sighs. "That was one of the most fantastic moments of my life."
By the time he reached his teens John already had 3 million flies to his credit. One by one his other interests – sport, music, books – bit the dust. "I suppose you could say that flies took over my life," he says.
"I loved the look, the feel, the sound of them. You can't really explain it to people who don't have the same enthusiasm. It's like some people love vintage cars or clocks. For me it was flies."
One of his party tricks is to put on a blindfold and identify the mating habits of bluebottles by their cries of ecstasy in orgasm.
Thus he can recognise the soothing whirr of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, an art deco flying masterpiece, and one of the first flying creatures on earth.
Or the satisfying burble of the Anopheles, which, with its double-speed wings, big bum and variable proboscis is considered by many connoisseurs to be the ultimate expression of the flyblown world.
"One of the interesting things about flying things," says John, "is that although the basic design hasn't changed that much, they are constantly evolving.”
"When they first came into the world they were seen as things of wonder. High society families would throw parties to celebrate getting their first 1,000 flies.
"Now we take them for granted, but to me they are as amazing as ever."
He found a job in the Army, where, he hoped; he could establish a perfect fusion of work and pleasure.
But the wages were low, and his quest for ever more exotic prey was growing costlier by the year.
The prize items of his current collection is the two handled gold-plated American-made ‘Kill’em Dead Ultimate G' (not displayed on the premises for security reasons) that he reckons would fetch £2,500 on a good day!
Well, there's a sucker born every minute, but John, sees the real value of his 126-piece swatter collection as its ability to tell the remarkable story of a dead flies and Garibaldi biscuits that too many of us take for granted.
Before fly extermination, he points out; life was a dirty, sometimes perilously unhygienic business.
The complete contents of houses had to be dragged outdoors to be cleaned, and even modest homes were forced to maintain domestic staffs to keep the fly-poo and all kinds of bugs at bay.
Early fly swatting tended to allow the flies to escape due to air pressure, blowing them away rather than sucking them towards you, with the result that the grotty little buggers were merely redistributed around the house.
The big breakthrough came at the beginning of the 1960’s when John went on deployment to the Middle East! It was there he came across the study made by Hubert Cecil Booth, a British engineer and inventor, who came up with a powered fly suction device misleadingly nicknamed 'The Puffing Billy'.
This hulking, oil-powered contraption had to be pulled down the street by horses, and parked outside the building to be de-fly’d.
In a scientific paper, Booth later recounted its effectiveness. " … this really was astonishing," he wrote: "two machines took half a ton of flies out of one of the largest shops in the West Bank one night."
A few years later John registered his very own patent for an ingenious electric-powered household fly killer from his cousin, and launched the world-beating 'Model O' (Short for Orifice for Obturating Orrible fings).
John said, “"I got a grant from the Princes Trust to open the Fly Swatters Arms – my nearby pub" he says, "and I thought it would be good to keep the collection there, to be honest I didn't think there'd be so much interest."
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