The Escape Artist: Life from the Saddle Book

Matt Seaton’s critically acclaimed memoir about his obsession for cycling and how that obsession was tamed. For a time there were four bikes in Matt Seaton’s life. His evenings were spent 'doing the miles' on the roads out of south London and into the hills of the North Downs and Kent Weald. Weekends were taken up with track meets, time trials and road races – rides that took him from cold village halls at dawn and onto the empty bypasses of southern England. With its rituals, its code of honour and its comradeship, cycling became a passion that bordered on possession. It was at once a world apart, private to its initiates and, through the races he rode in Belgium, Mallorca and Ireland, a passport to an international fraternity. But then marriage, children and his wife's illness forced a reckoning with real life and, ultimately, a reappraisal of why cycling had become so compelling in the first place. Today, those bikes are scattered, sold, or gathering dust in an attic. Wry, frank and elegiac, ‘The Escape Artist’ is a celebration of an amateur sport and the simple beauty of cycling. It is also a story about the passage from youth to adulthood, about what it means to give up something fiercely loved in return for a kind of wisdom.

For a time there were four bikes in Matt Seaton's life a training bike a track bike a mountain bike and a racing bike. His evenings were spent "doing the miles" on the roads between South London and the North Downs. Weekends were taken up with Club meetings road races and time trials - rides that took him to cold village halls at dawn and out onto the empty bypasses of Southern England. Cycling had become a passion that bordered on possession. When he was in the saddle real life remained at a comfortable distance. But this flight from responsibility could not last. Life came flooding in with his marriage to Ruth Picardie the birth of their twins and Ruth's brutal illness. Today the bikes that remain are gathering dust on top of the road grime from their last rides museum pieces of a life distantly remembered. "The Escape Artist" is at once a celebration of amateur sport a social history of the bicycle an honest account of adult responsibilities and a quiet hymn to the beauty of cycling for its own ends.