What the hell is water? This was the question the late American novelist David Foster Wallace posed in 2005 in a commencement speech to the graduating class of Kenyon College, Ohio. For Wallace the rhetorical purpose was not to get the students to consider water per se, but to encourage them to appreciate the extraordinary in the everyday.
It’s something I find myself contemplating as I stand under a shower so powerful that it is not only blowing away the cobwebs but exfoliating more than a good few skin cells. A morning shower is something I would normally take for granted but on an island where it rains so little, this thunderous stream feels decadent to the point of indecency.
Sitting at the same latitude as the Sahara Desert, Gran Canaria gets only a handful of rainy days a year, even in winter. This makes it a good place to consider the extraordinary nature of something as everyday as water.
