Briefly, a New Beginning

It's kind of interesting what's happening now. We've been in lockdown for a month so far and we have just been told to expect another month of the same ('at least'). The meaning of 'lockdown' seems to be changing as this crisis extends itself: the police are out there because there is almost no excuse left to take to the street (I saw a cop car fining some poor idiot last night at 2.00am from my window - all he wanted was a chocolate bar).
I live on a horse-farm, with stables and a couple of paddocks. There are over thirty horses and no one to ride them. At least I am out every day working on the scut jobs - watering, feeding and moving one from here to there, and another from hither to yon. Bits of horse kit (all with new names en castellano as I learn stuff with my sieve-like brain) and where we left them bent over a fence or on a wall somewhere. Fixing a fence, shouting at the water-heater. Collecting a massive number of eggs each day from the poultry; uprooting taters from the lower forty.
No one to help, because, you know, lockdown.
I had to go to the medical centre because my wife Alicia is still in a wheelchair after an accident in December and we needed a prescription. I'm talking to a nurse through the window of the car and we both have masks on, and rubber gloves and goggles. A fellow is energetically squirting the car with some killer mixture. I get the prescription and drive round the corner to the farmacia, whooping through my lowered mask to get my breath back.
The chemist from behind his sheet of virus-proof glass sells me a potion to wash my hands every time I leave the property.
So, we are fully kitted up, in case of doubt.
The IMF says to expect a recession as important as the Great Depression of 1929. Who the fuck is going to want to pay for riding lessons in a time like that, I wonder, or for livery service (we currently have ten horses that are 'paying guests'). I'd jump out of the window, only we live on the ground floor.
So, for the next month - at least - I will be driving down to the supermarket every once in a while, kitted up like an extra from the Andromeda Strain movie and quickly buying whatever goes well with eggs, or maybe over to the feed store for another truck-load of straw.
We never thought it would come to this, although we knew something was coming (my friend Jesse, an American gun-nut, was hoping for zombies). But, when it's all over, or - to be more precise - when it's as over as it's going to get, we won't be going back to the good old days. They've gone.
Expect more government control, a minimum guaranteed income, no foreign holidays, a highly cautious society (wary of football matches, cinemas, restaurants, bars and shopping malls) and a large number of places, currently closed, that won't be opening again.
Just try and explain all this to the horses.