“Tomorrow’s weather,” the forecast girl said, bright and chirpy despite the hour, “will be cloudy, fifteen degrees centigrade. 30% chance of rain showers in the region, which may spread across from the east in the afternoon. 40% chance of gravity showers.”

I grumbled, and stomped outside into the chill night air. The house’s roof armour was perfectly fine, and I knew it, but you always had to check. Houses like mine, built around the turn of the century, were built under what then was an obvious assumption – that gravity would always be pointing down. Not such a safe assumption these days, and so I had to be especially careful of cracks in the armour. One little crack could let the gravity in to soak into the beams of the roof, and then the place would tear itself apart.

I was still stomping as I put the ladder back in the garage and headed inside. I’d left the TV on, quietly broadcasting the gravity shower infomercial to an audience of none. They showed it every day at this time of year, just in case someone out there still wasn’t sure why we had the gravity showers, or what to do if you were caught out in one.

“…Higgs Boson,” I heard it say, “first isolated at CERN in 2016, proved to be…” I left it on, dutifully informing the void, while I boiled the kettle and looked threateningly at a pot of instant noodles. “…collapse of the waveform caused a number of… …explosion at the reactor sent billions of… …remarkably common in the atmosphere, in part due to…”

Half-hearted supper in hand, I slumped on the living-room sofa and flicked across to a different channel. “Nobody cares why”, I thought in the TV’s general direction. “I wish they’d stop showing that bloody thing. All that matters is that sometimes when it rains water, it also rains gravity. And that you really don’t want to be caught out in a gravity shower.”