Awarded a Peter Kirk scholarship, Ben Sims spent seven weeks in Paris aged nineteen, writing a monograph on Proust’s ‘Ruskinian Pilgrimage’ to the northern gothic cathedrals. In this time he lived with two charming drug dealers and their termite infestation, almost starved to death and had a religious experience on his first acquaintance with Walt Whitman. Ben now works as a fundraiser in London trying to save 38,500 churches, is a trustee of the Victorian Society and volunteers at ‘The Listening Place’ with people on the brink of suicide.