(COLOMBO, LANKAPUVATH) –They came with smiles on their faces and the customary homemade placards weaponising pithy soundbites.
“Get your tiny hands off our NHS,” “Free Melania” and one, in the hands of an American man with a disability, referring to Donald Trump’s infamous imitation of a journalist with arthrogryposis: “Mock me to my face.”
But there were also chills, not least when a formation of women in the red uniforms of handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale walked slowly past the National Gallery with their heads bowed.
On this occasion, though not the first time that the forces of anti-Trumpism had massed together to send a message of rejection to the US president, Trafalgar Square had been (very) loosely divided into different zones or, in the parlance of street protest, “blocs”.
