Walking through Athens and what do you see? A dozen masked maniacs throwing chunks of marble at 6,000 armoured doughnut-munchers with shields. Yes, it's one year on from the start of the Greek riots of '08 and some people decided that the anniversary of a boy's death was a good time to chuck some marble, petrol bombs and, most devastatingly, oranges at policemen.

How do I know this? Because I was there. Well, not for all of it, obviously. It was not my protest, it was not my riot. It was however my little two day holiday at the end of our time in Greece and in the manner of any decent tourist I checked out the 'what's on' section and found that this was at number one.

I will make no statements here and to be honest after a close look at both sides I'm not feeling too prone to pick one. I didn't like the behaviour of the police. Bloody unprofessional to pick up marble that has been thrown at you and chuck it back at unarmoured rioters if you ask me (I saw this myself on a number of occasions, by the way), on the other hand some of their comrades had been set on fire earlier in the day with petrol bombs (check some other photos out there, the Times website for one – I wasn't around for this, but it doesn't look so pretty). I only hope that in their position I would have shown more restraint. As a rioter I would probably have been so pissed off at being tear gassed (goes pretty high up on my list of non-recommended activities and I got it lightly) that it would have done the opposite of calming the situation.

Central Athens today felt like a police state. There were six or seven police on every corner. This wasn't like if something mad happens in London, where police huddle in one zone, it would be like 100 rioters ransacking Oxford Street leading to police occupying every street corner out to Camden and Islington in the north and Southwark in the south, etc...

I couldn't really tell how much the locals were on the side of order or chaos. There were enough people in lulls kicking hunks of marble back at the rioters to reinforce them and enough people whose only advice was to steer clear. “Everything's changed.” the owner of the hostel we're staying at said. On the other hand, he grew up in a military dictatorship so it certainly has. The one thing that really has stuck with me was one girl walking hurriedly by when I found myself on the pavement between rioters and police asking me “please don't take photographs of the demonstrator's faces, it could be very dangerous for them. That is unless you are police, and then I do not need to speak to you.” As she spoke she bubbled up with emotion. As she left the police unhelpfully advanced to exactly where I was and I had to duck a hail of marble for a moment or two before both sides decided I wasn't an appropriate focus for the day's events. Good job too.

On TV it will no doubt look mental but those bits didn't last long and it was mostly rather pedestrian. Rioters screaming at the police from the middle of the road were generally flanked by people just going about their business and there wasn't so much the anarchy reported last year but more of an 'if I get the right angle of view here I can sell it to my editor as a real story' kind of riot. It ebbed more than it flowed. Still, it caused a hell of a mess.

Here's a shot from Julia 'telling it how it is'. Riot police legging it towards nobody in particular and a load of rather bored onlookers either too scared to get involved or not scared enough to do anything sensible like, oh, I don't know, NOT be where the riot is.

I'll leave you with the end of the day, a couple of rioter's weapons laying where they were thrown. The oranges, in case you wonder, are apparently highly bitter (although Julia, with no thought of her own safety, intends to try one in the interest of bringing you the full story) and are grown by the city on most streets to provide the old 'boulevard effect' on streets narrow enough to be more like a lane or a passage. The marble might hurt more but slip on half an orange at full pelt and you'll know about it.