A nxious pensioners tightened their grip on their shopping bags and hurried across Broadmead as fast as their health would allow. Parents with kids in tow swiftly steered their confused, pointing little ones into nearby shops. And anyone who wasn't quick enough got caught in the crossfire.

Necks craned as shoppers nervously peeked out from shop doorways wondering whether it was safe to come out yet.

Why? Because a selfish group of self-styled anti-capitalism warriors decided to turn Broadmead into their own private playground.

Dozens of them ran around at high speed chasing each other on Wednesday afternoon, weaving between startled shoppers.

If this sounds like fun, I'm not describing it right. It was genuinely frightening, downright dangerous and almost impossible to avoid.

Mounted police and police community support officers were watching the mayhem, and one of them told me he'd just seen one of the runners very nearly knock over a passerby.

Now, if that had been my 82-year-old nan, I'd have joined your game of tag or or whatever juvenile pursuit you were playing and you'd have had to run even faster – or else.

Adding a surreal edge to proceedings, the runners' shouts and shrieks clashed mid-air with Grieg's Piano Concerto played by a teenager in school uniform on Broadmead's Play Me I'm Yours street piano.

Apparently, the runners' anti-social behaviour was staged by a self-proclaimed socially-conscious group called Co-Mutiny as part of a "week of action" enabling them to vent their collective spleen about issues ranging from rampant capitalism to animal rights.

As you may have already read in the Post this week, its protesters are squatting in the old Catholic Pro-Cathedral in Park Place near The Triangle.

From looking at their website, myself and numerous Broadmead shoppers got caught up in the middle of the Bristol Anarchist Games. The website says by way of explanation, and I quote: "The street is a critical symbol because your whole conditioning is geared towards keeping you indoors."

Err, right. And the site issued this rallying cry ahead of the event: "Come and subvert corporate enclosures with a series of games."

Now, I think you'd be hard-pushed these days to find anyone who's pro-animal cruelty or who wasn't incensed by the banks' abuse of their power and the mess it's left our world in.

But here's the thing. By staging dangerous, anti-social stunts like the Broadmead running games, you're cheapening your argument, you're overshadowing your valid points and – crucially – you're not hitting the fat cats where it hurts, you're not "sticking it to The Man". You're just frightening people.

I object to people ramming their views down other people's throats. Take those anti-vivisectionists who set up stalls in Broadmead draped in big posters depicting blood-spattered animals – posters that regularly reduce small children to tears. Is this really the best way to make your point?

Ditto those zombie-march anti-capitalist sheep who stagger and groan through Cabot Circus dressed as the blood-spattered undead. Haven't you got anything better to do?

See, you think all of us who work for a living and pay taxes are the brainwashed drones with no minds of our own, don't you? And yet you're all wearing a "uniform", you're all conforming to non-conformity, you're all hiding behind costumes and fake blood. What good are you actually achieving?

Bristol is a magnet for incurably right-on trustafarians who've had the best education money can buy and feel compelled to rebel against their rich parents by not washing their hair, not contributing positively to society and not thinking for themselves by joining some group which makes them feel alternative purely because it stands for the exact opposite to what their parents think.

Valid messages get lost amid idiotic, childish stunts – and sometimes innocent people get hurt.

All I ask is for a little care in the Co-Mutiny.