The commentariat seems even more convinced than normal that Britain's hospitals are a catastrophe, its civil service a farce and its inner cities godforsaken cesspits of crime.Not all the evidence, of course, is to the contrary.
Orascom's Koryolink has signed up 185,000 subscribers in North Korea, of all godforsaken places.
And every one of those godforsaken boxes is ticked now.
Now these godforsaken people are gone, taking their vanity and their warped value systems with them.
When what has actually made him a champion, of course, is his cussed resolve to win at all costs, even on a foul, godforsaken Tuesday night in the Potteries when this ground looked like a graveyard for any manager whose job prospects are questioned.
She is more than marginally visible, imparting confidences like "I think, This place is godforsaken, but its broken beauties are in my bloodstream".
The winner of the category titled "most godforsaken place you ever visited for a story" recounted being assigned to write about Babylon, in 1957; when he arrived at the ancient city, he said, he found "a pile of sand".
We should all be so godforsaken.
One of the most powerful is "Y Rhyfel" (War), in which he evokes a Godforsaken world of fratricidal mayhem, ending with the lines (in Alan Llwyd's translation): "The harps to which we sang are hung/On willow boughs, and their refrain/Drowned by the anguish of the young/Whose blood is mingled with the rain".
Between the gawping and the roast lamb dinners, I struggled to make sense of German settlements, Tehuelche place names, Anglophile ranch-owners and ruddy Welsh faces on the coast; crossing the empty steppe, I wondered why any of these would come to such an arid, godforsaken place to make a home.
One group, on escaping from the most godforsaken tract of the Mojave desert, doffed their hats, turned back and said: "Goodbye, Death Valley!" "The name stuck," notes Brands.The journey to North Dakota today is more straightforward.
