Well the blogger gods aren't letting me post any picture so I found this cheerful little snippit to post instead. Funny, don't they say the same thing about the Pacific Northwest??

The English have been accused by foreigners of being the beau-ideal of a suicidal people, The charge is almost too ridiculous to merit serious refutation. It has clearly been established that where there is one suicide in London, there are five in Paris,"1 Forbes Winslow's words typify Victorian defensiveness over England's seemingly undeserved reputation as "la terre classique du suicide." England's fogs, her earnestness, her graveyard school and poetry of melancholy had given rise to a French myth that was difficult to dispel. By 1800, England had become known as the European center of suicide: home of Edward Young who had cried "O Britain, infamous for suicide" (Young, 5.442) home of Robert Blair who had exclaimed "Self-murder! name it not: Our island's shame/ That makes her the reproach of neighbouring stares"(Blair, 2.403-4) and home of Chatterton, boy wonder and romantic suicide par excellence, whose celebrated early death seemed a glorious martyrdom to Europe's artists. It was a land of black, dark Novembers, dripping with mists of self-destruction. On the continent this myth persisted, provoking an angry English response throughout the nineteenth century. As late as 1878, Thomas Hardy was continuing Winslow's battle by undercutting the French. In The Return of the Native he says of Gym Yeobright: "He had reached the stage in a young man's life when the grimness of the general human situation first becomes clear; and the realization of this causes ambition to halt awhile. In France it is not uncustomary to commit suicide at this stage; in England we do much better, or touch worse, as the case may be (Hardy, 149).