The disease occurs when a breakdown in the immune system causes scarring on the brain and spinal cord, which damages the nerves, but as an individual's specific nerve damage will depend on the sites of the scarring, no two MS sufferers have exactly the same symptoms.
‘I'm never anywhere for long these days, but this is a great luxury to have, a little corner in my favourite place in the world,' she sighs, setting down dishes of fruit and crisps on the glass-topped coffee table before settling beside me on the sofa.
‘I don't have time to volunteer, but I can bake cakes, so this is my way of giving back.' Saffron recently made a Beanie Boo cake for Freyja, who is now ten and well, although her health continues to be monitored. And because Freyja's sister Florence, seven, has been through so much upheaval, Saffron baked a Beanie Boo birthday cake for her, too. She even found time to make an extra cake
toddler lunch ideas for picky eaters their brother, Stanley, aged one.
Favourite look? The star is clearly trying to get in all her white before Labor Day as she wore the same outfit the day before with different shoes while out with a male friend at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood
'I've spent my entire life in devotion to creativity, and along the way I've developed a set of beliefs about how it works - and how to work with it - that is entirely and unapologetically based upon magical thinking. And when I refer to magic here, I mean it literally - in the Hogwarts sense. I believe that creativity is a force of enchantment.
The book is also brimming with positive ways in which to think about creative living. Got no time to devote to your art? Elizabeth urges you to treat your creativity like a lover: sneak off alone whenever you can (‘You can get a lot done in 15 minutes, as any furtive teenager can tell you,' she says). Feeling creatively blocked? Seduce your creativity, she advises. Get dressed up, light a candle, put on some lipstick, woo creativity to come to you.
When Freyja Lingard was diagnosed with Hodgkin's T-cell lymphoma - a type of blood cancer - five years ago, she was plunged into an intensive treatment regime that impacted not just on her life, but her whole family's
‘Even in countries feminism would not have appeared to reach [Nigeria, the Middle East], birth rates are going down. And that makes the biggest difference of all in a woman's life - how many babies she is responsible for having and caring for - because until you can monitor that and be in control of that, you can't even have the rest of the conversation.'
Scroll through the Baking A Smile website or Facebook page and you can see the phenomenal results: cakes of every size and guise - princesses, superheroes and cute creatures - all lovingly made by generous bakers, whose reward is the same as Sophie's - delight on the face of a joyful child.
While she hopes to debunk the paradigm of the tortured artist, Elizabeth willingly admits to believing in ‘hippie voodoo' when it comes to inspiration. Big Magic - as the title hints - recounts anecdotes from a cast of creatives who all see inspiration as something rather mystical and miraculous, a tiger whose tail one must catch, fairy dust, a form of enchantment that attempts to catch one's attention and that can feel like falling in love. Fluffy though all this may sound, Elizabeth recalls the Ancient Greeks and Romans, who believed in the idea of an external ‘Daemon' of creativity - almost like a sort of Dobby the house elf who assisted in their labours - which they called a genius. They did not, she points out, believe that a person was a genius, but that they had a genius. ‘The idea of an external genius helps to keep the artist's ego in check,' she writes, ‘distancing him somewhat from the burden of taking either full credit or full blame for the outcome of his work.'
I must admit, I generally abhor the self-help industry (and am also irked by the widespread use of ‘artist' to describe anyone who has ever made anything, from a film to a fancy dress costume) so I was wary of a book about ‘the creative process'. But I needn't have been concerned. By creative living, Elizabeth is not talking about, necessarily, a life that is professionally or exclusively devoted to the arts, but ‘living a life that is driven more strongly by creativity than fear'.
I tell her about my recent visit to the Brooklyn Army Terminal, a slightly secret historic New York building that was the hub of the US military operation and its supplies during WWII, and from where every American serviceman, and many other Allied soldiers, shipped out - including my own grandfather and Elvis Presley. Elizabeth, intrigued, makes a plan to visit the site soon as part of her research. ‘This is what I love about the weird kismet of creativity,' she says. ‘This is very important for me to know, and you just gave it to me, like a scavenger-hunt clue.' That, she concludes, is Big Magic, right there.
But she has been well since then, and believes that Baking A Smile has been an essential part of her recovery. (It has certainly been a confidence boost - as well as her Women of the
Toddler Lunch Ideas 1 Year Old honour, she also recently received a Point of Light award from David Cameron for her achievements in the service of others.)