Nice

I dreamed we were going to sell my parents' old house, complete with contents, and I was going round it in advance of the sale filling a plastic bag with oddments I wanted to keep. I heard someone say, "This lot ought to bring in at least £14 billion"- and I thought, "Well, that'd be nice..."

Euphemisms

My mother says, "I want to spend a penny"- a locution that goes back to the now far-off days when you had to put a penny (an old pre-decimal penny) in a slot to unlock the cubicle in a public toilet.

My grandmother went with, "I need to see a man about a dog," which as a child I took literally. I had a mental picture of that man: he wore a flat cap and a hunting jacket and drove one of those shooting brakes with a half-timbered rear end, while the dog was a pointer or some such- a large working dog- and a far cry from the sealyhams and dachshunds my grandmother actually favoured. So what did dhe want with him and it? Who knew? Grown-ups were weird...