A journey to hell and back: Alastair Down's 2008 interview with Robert Alner

First published on September 22, 2008

It is a warm enough September morning for some of the spinal unit patients at Salisbury's Odstock Hospital to be outside getting some fresh air. The biker, early 20s, lies on his stomach on a trolley, his long, heavily tattooed arms reaching down to his insulated coffee cup and cigarettes on the concrete beneath him.

It is hard to cut a defiant figure when you are never going to be doing anything from the waist down, but our man manages it. He retains a huge, long mane of clean black hair, partially corralled into a ponytail, but it is the hands that tell the story – he wears the biker's leather mittens with the back of them liberally studded in metal. You can take the boy off the bike, but you can't take the bike out of the boy, and he is sending out the message: "I am still me."