Not her story

When you are insecure about your writing, it helps to start off with someone else's. Apart from assisting me to slip into the groove, Douglas Adams sets a certain tone: light & frothy, witty and not too pompous. That's my aim too. And when I proofread, I'm immune (at least for his bit) to the temptation of endlessly exchanging one word for another.
 

In the lead-in to The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you read, or hear narrated in a voice with a BBC accent:
 

‘And then, one Thursday, nearly 2,000 years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realised what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

‘Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a hyperspace by-pass, and so the idea was lost forever.
 

‘This is not her story.’