Before the elaborately-coiffed young man had even completed his request, Seth had started on one of his inimitable (and oft-repeated) power-distribution yarns. A faraway look came into his eyes (and into those of his audience) as he spoke in lyrical phrases of late-night callouts to flooded underground switchgear-rooms and runaway horse-trams colliding with wind-felled transmission-poles.
"Bunch of cissies, they all are," said Seth, wiping the back of a hoary hand across the front of his dentureless mouth. "These here young whippersnappers what calls 'emselves cablers nowadays – they don't know they're born; never done a proper day's work in their loives."
Pausing only to ingest the occasional aspic-smeared trotter, Seth told of how apprentice deputy under-fusemen used to be trained when he joined the company as a lad of just 11 in 1903. "Up at four in the mornin' we was. It were [indistinct] freezin', particularly in the winter when the weather were cold. We spent a whole week on a customer-handlin' course at the London College of Surliness and Insubordination. Then it were eight year of splicing live 11kv cables with yer bare hands.
"These here nancy-boys you get down a manhole these days turn the current off when they're working! I mean, where's the craftsmanship in that? You can't get a good join unless you first spit on the woire while it's [indistinct] hot and still smokin' with red lead. Then you lick off any surplus solder, ram the bugger back into its gripping-sleeve and get the [indistinct] out of that manhole afore the slaked lime soaks through the treacle-paper!"