U.K.

But while the Labour Party tears itself apart, with a challenge to its far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, there are some real positives to take from what happened. There is still a chance that Britain might not leave the EU. Article 50 notification, the official start of the withdrawal process, has not happened, and will not happen until the autumn at the earliest. Once it does, Britain and our European neighbors then have to come to agreements on the status of Brits abroad and Europeans in the United Kingdom, about contributions to the EU budget, and so on. 

This question is by no means frivolous. Look at the present prime minister, David Cameron. Yes, Mr. Cameron was born in England, and is the product of Eton and Oxford. But he is very obviously of Scots descent. His surname fairly reeks of heather and haggis. Mr. Cameron’s immediate predecessor, Gordon Brown, was born and educated in Scotland. Mr. Brown’s immediate predecessor, Tony Bair, was also born in Scotland. Brown and Blair were both from the Labor Party, which was co-founded by a Scotsman named Keir Hardie. Ramsay MacDonald, another Scot and Labor Party co-founder, became Labor’s first prime minister in 1929.

Beyond the media spectacle and daily tourists, a parallel world exists within London. A world that seems not to observe the visitor. A reality away from the opulence, the speed and the cosmopolitan daily routine. These are neighbors, people with experiences, or those with more or less truncated lives. People who move silently, unheard, ubiquitous among visitor masses, blind and hardworking.

While contactless credit cards have been available since 2008, when Barclaycard first released them, the actual usage of the cards has been very low. In fact, recent studies have found that of all the people that have contactless cards in their wallets, only a quarter have actually used them. That equates to around 5 percent of the UK population having actually used contactless payment. That's a  low figure in anyone's book - especially for a technology that's been around for more four years.