The Tulip Table

Let transcendence bloom

A few weeks ago I launched my new show, Abi’s Kitchen Table.

Dear reader, I have not had a kitchen table for four years.

In June 2020, I moved – maskless and perplexed – to a flat in South London. The furniture I had didn’t fit in the new space. I’m sure that if my husband Terry had been alive, he would have been more organised, but I found myself feeling very alone and, in historical terms, about to be swept up in the gritty shallows of a speeding collectivist Tsunami.

Death makes us do strange, impulsive things, like sleeping with inappropriate people in risky places, or taking too many drugs. Luckily, I’d done most of that in my 20s and 30s, so it wasn’t something that my impulsivity leant towards. My strange, impulsive thing was buying an expensive Saarinen Tulip table. I think I wanted to replace the absolute desolation I felt after Terry’s death with something beautiful. If I bought this table, perhaps he would come back to life and join me for breakfast, and afterwards I’d delicately wipe the toast crumbs off the exquisite Carrara marble with a damp cloth.

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross calls this the bargaining stage of grief.

I locked my reckless purchase in a storage unit in Kennington, and proceeded to spend four years hunched over, eating from a low-slung, glass coffee table. I expected people to shout mockingly from across the street: ‘Esmerelda, the bells!’

Growing up, our kitchen table was where the beautiful messiness of life happened. In a film, there would be a part where they do one of those sped-up day to night montages, when you see everything that’s happened in a short space of time. Hastily-scoffed cereal, a cafetière full of lukewarm coffee, swearing, Nutella splodges, raised voices, a tea pot, sympathy, newspapers, pistachios, debate, wine bottles, Taramasalata, kisses, olives, vodka bottles, hysterical laughter, zakuski, prayer, salami, Russian bread, hangovers, borsch, arguments, tomatoes, tears, books, friends, chocolates, fart noises, and Bakewell tarts. The montage would then cut to Oswald; our rosy-cheeked cockatiel pecking at his cuttlefish, Suzy; the spoilt siamese coming in through her own door in the kitchen window, and our beloved Lakeland Terriers, Buttons and Jockey, sighing contentedly in their biscuity beanbags.

Nothing was off limits at the table. Recently, I’ve started to realise that this is precisely what’s missing in modern family life. Sitting around a table seems like such a simple idea but in reality it is essential for cohesiveness and the exchange of ideas.

When I was living in Moscow, the kitchen table had the same significance, if not more. The kitchen was tiny but somehow five people managed to sit around that table. Mordash, the giant-pawed Airedale terrier would stick his leathery snout round the door, or lie like a black and tan rug in the hallway. Sometimes I would sit on my own with Galina Pavlovna, the babushka of the family. She didn’t speak much English which was great for improving my Russian. Her doleful blue eyes sparkled like tiny, topaz jewels as she told me how her dreams of being a ballerina had been cut short when she broke her leg. We sipped delicious black tea together, and she traded stories about living under Stalin for tales of Harvey Nichols and Princess Diana.

When we sat as a family, the kitchen sang with our layered voices, overlapping each other like an Orthodox choir. We talked about what everybody had done that day, and what we might do tomorrow. I told them about my day at the Conservatoire and what pieces of music I was learning. We discussed the serious food shortages, public transport, Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev, and the short-lived Perestroika and Glasnost.

So, you’ve come over for dinner (you’re looking terrific, by the way), I’ve poured you a large glass of Merlot, and we’re discussing how totalitarian regimes are established. In brief, here are the five stages we would talk about whilst getting slowly drunk:

1. Discontent and rumblings – every new order rises on the ruins of the old. Those who would establish a new regime must tap into or generate dissatisfaction with the status quo. However much those desiring a reset may despise the old order, they can’t accomplish much without harnessing or fabricating a similar attitude in the public. Then the revolutionary totalitarian appears as the solution to these problems.

2. The False Saviour and the First Revolution – After identifying and appealing to the people’s discontent, the totalitarian presents himself as a saviour. In stage 2, the revolutionary totalitarian enacts a dramatic change to “solve” the problems and discontent of stage 1.

3. Censorship, Persecution, Propaganda, and the Ending of Opposition – In stage 3, the initial upheaval of stage 2 has passed. The old order has been fundamentally changed, and now various forces begin to react. The rising totalitarian government faces many enemies, often dubbed “counterrevolutionaries” or “extremists.” Here in its infancy, the new order must struggle to gain more power and maintain that which has been acquired. For this reason, it sets about combatting its enemies through censorship and persecution.

4. The Crisis – Stage 4 prepares the way for the totalitarian government to grasp total control over those under its rule. It consists of a crisis moment, which may be either a real threat or a false flag that seems to threaten the nation.

5. Purges, Genocide, and Total Control – using the crisis of stage 4 as an excuse, the totalitarian government now seizes absolute control over the lives of its citizens. The regime overcomes the enemies of stages 3 and 4. It begins brutally enforcing its ‘utopia’ and ideology on the populace. This stage also sees the greatest atrocities committed against the populace because resistance to the totalitarian regime has been crushed. The people are defenceless and demoralised. Nothing stands between the regime and its victims. This stage involves mass killings as the regime liquidates any remaining enemies while seeking to control every detail of citizens’ lives.

Since Starmer’s Labour Party came to power on July 4th, the United Kingdom has seen an accute acceleration towards a collectivist authoritarianism many of us saw as inevitable. The Conservative Party and their lackeys kindly paved the way for the New World Utopian hell – championed by lefist intellectuals – to be fully implemented. Those famous checks and balances of a previous era have been slowly eroded over decades as part of the Long March through the institutions towards a collectivist new world; using all the methods we know very well have been used before. Looking at 2020 onwards it has been implemented using fear, atomisation, propaganda, division, and persecution of so-called enemies of the state.

Over the past few years, we have witnessed the increased global politicisation of science using Covid, Climate, Race and Gender so that it comes neatly under a centralised state umbrella. Did you know, for instance, that Climate ‘reporters’ are being encouraged to come forward in councils around the country? These ‘reporters’ will spy on their neighbours ‘climate change’ habits. Why are you telling us this, Abi? Real eyewitness statements and letters tell us that private life in Stalin’s Russia reduced people to a breed of so-called ‘whisperers’ — people scared to give full voice to doubts or dissidence, whispering dark secrets behind the backs of neighbours, friends and even family. Stalin's regime relied heavily on ‘mutual surveillance,’ urging families to report on each other in communal living spaces and report ‘disloyalty.’ Many people did what they could to survive, but they dealt with shame and guilt long after Stalin's reign. The same applies to Mao’s China, where reporting on family, friends or fellow citizens and denunciation was par for the course.

Never mind numerology, it’s all there in testimonies from your fellow human beings who have smelt the leather of the jackboots that have stood on their necks and sent a flare up into the night sky as a warning for those that come after them.

Even Karl Marx would do a double take at the speed at which the ‘liberal’ West has eagerly embraced the methods of the ideologies it has railed against vociferously for 75 years. If you’re reading this thinking this is hyperbole, ask yourself why the mainstream media doesn’t have any shows on TV that include independently dissenting voices, and why, for example, simple questions about the morality of lockdowns, testing, masks and the safety of the experimental vaccines were not permitted and denounced as nonsense without exception.

Here’s something to think about: more people have been arrested in the UK for posts on social media since 2018 than in Putin’s Russia. And it’s only getting worse under Starmer. He is removing dissenting voices at an alarming rate. As Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service, he is of course in a prime position to further influence the judiciary. As a Fabian Marxist, he believes that communism or communitarianism (a word used deliberately to make communism seem more palatable) has never been ‘properly’ implemented. These people are so wedded to their ‘we know best’ secular ideology, they believe that this time they will definitely get it right if they do the same thing. The people won’t notice the arbitrary rise in taxes, removal of land, free speech, and millions of deaths if it’s being done by men in dark blue suits and slicked back hair, rather than by men in green uniforms with neatly trimmed moustaches.

Like a tick gnawing into the folds of a dog’s neck, this ‘greater good’ Fabian ideology has sunk its fangs into both right and left, and has strengthened its grip since the 1960s. Most of these ideas have been breeding like rabbits in the elite places of learning such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard et al. It amazes me how many of the so-called ‘awake’ still secretly revere their own education at these establishment dens of groupthink, despite evidence that most circular thought that favours the gatekeeper grows there in the dark like mushrooms covered in shit.

Never trust a hippy, or a self-professed intellectual.

During my time studying in Moscow, I was invited to see a documentary film called нужен ли коммунисм – Is communism necessary? The little theatre was packed. In one scene, there is footage of a statue of Stalin being pulled down. As it lies sideways on the ground, the familiar moustache facing downwards, a dog stops, sniffs it, cocks his leg, and pisses on it.

Thank God for dogs. They rarely disappoint.

After the film had finished, I fell into polite conversation with an elderly woman sitting next to me. It gradually transpired that she was Lavrentiy Beria’s widow. Beria was Stalin’s dreaded chief of police whose job it was to round up alleged enemies of the state and either imprison or execute them.

Like it or not, history does show us patterns of human behaviour and if we scoff at or minimise the early stirrings of those patterns of behaviour because we’re focused on the more esoteric parts of conspiracy, we do so at our peril. It’s like watching your house as it burns to the ground and being more interested in why the fireman putting the fire out has an accent you can’t place.

Remember my favourite saying: Focus on the doughnut, not the hole.

What we have seen, particularly in the past four years, is the leaning into these stages by the state, and although perhaps not fully realised, it certainly reveals the same mindset behind the desire to implement them. Like grief, the stages often merge or appear to diminish, but the possibility that you may smell your husband’s aftershave and weep uncontrollably, is always there. Make no mistake, the free world (was it ever free?) is being throttled by an ideology that contains a deeply dark, anti-humanist message. The philosophical concept of the slippery slope is there for a reason.

Remember that social media didn’t exist in the first half of the 20th Century when these unspeakable ideologies took hold, but now these twisted ideas are spunked at lightning speed over billions of people; many of whom are too busy looking at how to apply glittery eyeshadow and sharing China-funded Tik Tok videos to notice their fundamental, beautiful, cherished rights are being removed in real life.

So, what do we do now, I hear you mutter.

How did Russians, for example, live through dark authoritarian times?

From conversations I’ve had, they found meaning in all the transcendent things: such as music, poetry, and faith in God. Due to the barbaric destruction of most of the churches by the Bolsheviks, a network of secret spiritual meetings started to grow. It soon sprouted into a sort of underground church running parallel to the official Orthodox Church. It saved many ordinary Russians from being destroyed by fear, isolation and despair. These meetings gave them hope through the transcendence of faith. The catacomb church, as it became known, came into existence in the late 1920s and played a significant part in Russian national life for nearly fifty years. This carried on well into the Krushchev era; people would meet in secret in apartments, like the one I lived in just outside Moscow. Father Aleksandr, the priest who baptised me, would go to these places and hold services for young and old.

After the makeshift service, they would doubtless have sat in communion around a kitchen table, sipping warm tea sweetened with fruit jam, perhaps exchanging small icons, sharing jokes and stories about their families, and lighting the candle of hope for each other.

Let us be grateful that magnificent people who came before us have given us some kind of road map for finding meaning when all seems lost.

I suggest you pour yourself a drink, lay the map out on your kitchen table, and take a look.