The Lib Dems' predicament "could turn around quite quickly", Cable tells me, before his optimism seems to slightly fail him, and what he says heads off in a slightly more fatalistic direction.
The predicament revolves around a simple issue of scale.
Their predicament made headlines around the world - they had no food, no water, no toilet and only enough oxygen to last two days.
As a way around the predicament, she decided to apply to Oxford, where she could join its drama society.
The magnitude of my predicament seemed apparent to everyone around me.
A stranger asked, "Mr Oë, what do you think of prime minister Koizumi?" His failure to reply - Oë mimes his predicament with an outstretched arm around an immobile son's shoulders - provoked the remark: "Oë's got so arrogant since the Nobel!" He wrings humour from the incident, but shrugs helplessly.
In October, Ta-Nehisi Coates will publish "We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy," a series of essays on race, written during the Obama era, that concludes with the current predicament: "The white supremacy swirling around Trump is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power".
The Ferryman demands payment for passage to the land of the dead; Qudsja, short on money, remains in limbo, drowned souls chanting around her. Her predicament is solved by the unexplained entrance of an Icelandic schoolteacher and a class of fifty boys.
