Before you know it, chains chug, wheels wind, gears grind and in the colorful cart behind him a cheese-wheel chunk of ice is shaved, its shivering pieces piling up in a stainless steel bowl.
In the distance, set back against a grey mountain of coal waste a century in the making, stands Maltby's monumental winding gear, silent and brooding.
Fenced off shafts, tailings (dumps of waste sand) and ruined engine houses that used to work pumps, winding gear and stamps (crushers) are engulfed in birch trees and flowering gorse.
Now the winding gear is silent and the only noise comes from enormous bulldozers hauling down buildings and flattening earth as part of a £25m scheme to turn the colliery near Doncaster into a 120-acre "distribution park" where supermarkets or transport companies sort and shuffle their wares in an initiative that could create 1,500 jobs.
The modern towers containing the winding gear still overshadow the main street but, unless someone comes up with a £100m investment, the last evidence of the industry that brought Simpson's father, Tom senior, from the Durham coalfield will disappear in 18 months' time.
The pit-head winding gear sits at the side of a roundabout - the scene so familiar in regeneration towns like Ebbw Vale.
"We have had an assurances that they will retain part of the winding gear and headstocks on site when it is redeveloped," he said.
A miners' heritage group wants the site which still has the pit winding gear and engine house in place to become a visitor attraction.
"The slag heaps were grassed over, the winding gears were nowhere to be seen, and when we spoke to people they said, 'Oh, that was the first thing they did.' There was a cultural cleansing of the entire area.
