This was ideal as it gave me time to rest and recuperate in a hotel after my meetings while also offering hubby and 10-year-old the chance to explore.
Our daughter loves trips to the capital, she is particularly keen on the underground and the excitement of being somewhere so busy and diverse.
In fact she even declared over dinner on the first night that what she likes the most about London is "all the cultures and languages."
Wise words I think, especially as we're living in a time of such division.
I didn't have to work the day we arrived so we took ourselves off to the Science Museum, it wasn't a place we'd been to before and after spending four-and-a-half fascinated hours there, I really couldn't understand why.
It's an astonishing place and this summer there is a spectacular space-themed exhibition. Should you ever want to know what astronauts eat, what they do to train and where they poop (gigantic space nappies apparently) then this is the place for you.
But just along from the space extravaganza were two other fascinating displays - one looking at the advancement of technology from the 1700s onwards and the other looking at the body, brain and self.
As it happened, I found MS in both of these exhibits. From one of the first MRI machines, a very small and clunky-looking contraption dating from 1983, to the advancements in ways science has started to rebuild and repair nerves.
And from the Science Museum to the science of MS, finding treatments to repair myelin is becoming the holy grail of multiple sclerosis research.
Its importance is explained by Professor Anna Williams in the MS Society's summer edition of research matters:
"Without myelin, the fragile nerve fibres are left exposed and unable to send signals clearly. Our brains have the incredible ability to repair myelin. but with age and repeated attacks, this stops working so well. And as MS progresses, disability accumulates because nerves are permanently lost.
"Research has shown that people who have higher levels of myelin repair see a reduction in the progression of their MS. So if we can repair myelin, we should be able to reduce the number of nerves that people lose, and slow or even stop disability progression."
At present, myelin repair has not been tested on humans but clinical trials are in the process of being designed, organised and funded.
The hope is that myelin repair treatments will become a reality for people with MS over the coming years.
Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it be lovely to see a display in the Science Museum in the not too distant future explaining how we discovered ways to repair our damage?
Aberdeen Magnetic Resonance Imager from 1983. Science Museum.
:: Fix me now by Garbage
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