The ideology of austerity certainly demands we tighten our belts and accept a miserable future.
For that matter, Mr. Douglas-Fairhurst observes, Dickens's fiction is filled with doubles and alternative outcomes: "Great Expectations" has two endings, one happy, one sad, while Scrooge is both given a glimpse of his lonely, miserable future and a chance to avoid this destiny by changing his miserly ways.
The meal at which Speer, fresh from Spandau, announces to his family that he is going to grant them a miserable future by dredging up the past in his memoirs, is staged like the Last Supper, with Speer's betrayal the more devastating because it is executed with a sort of innocence.
In recommending an expansion in the supply of scientists, NSB isn't damning then to a miserable future; it is just making that future more challenging and less certain.
The Prince of Wales has urged the pensions industry to ensure portfolios are "resilient in the long term" or risk condemning future generations to "an exceptionally miserable future".
In a pre-recorded speech, Prince Charles told the National Association of Pension Funds that sustainable investments were especially important in "increasingly uncertain times" to avoid a "miserable future".
When I wanted a picture of the most miserable future ever, I used to find myself imagining a boot from Cyberdog stamping on a badly rolled spliff forever.
In the original story, the future version of Kitty Pryde time-travels back in time into her young self's brain and works with the present-day X-Men to prevent the atrocity that kickstarts the whole miserable future.
At 18 and a half, I am now a licensed driver -- and not even as a result of ill-masked comments from my parents hinting at an assured miserable future in the event that I never learn how to drive, which is truthfully how I had always assumed it would happen.
While such action might seem extreme, recent announcements on the entirely miserable future of cultural spaces in Peckham, South London, certainly makes you wonder how far things would have to go before we might see a little Zündung in the capital.
