light, padding, follow the van

The sun, low in the sky, comes off the wet tarmac, this afternoon, with a blinding light.

A group of clouds for a few minutes pack the sky like the padding of an eiderdown.

Reading an account of the cockney music hall singer, Marie Lloyd in The Victorians by A N Wilson. I note for the first time the significance of her famous song:

"My old man said follow the van
And don't dilly dally on the way.
Off went the cart with me home packed in it,
I followed on with my old cock linnet - but
I dillied, I dallied, I dallied and I dillied,
Lost me way and don't know where to roam
Who's going to put up the old iron bedstead
If I can't find my way home.

It is, Wilson points out, about "being evicted, piling ones few pathetic belongings on to a cart and getting drunk", a humorous but sad comment on the poverty in the slums at the end of the nineteenth century.