Sonnet 75

Leigh Delamere, you should have written verse:
a minor, whimsical, Pre-Raphaelite,
or modernist perhaps, but not too terse,
although stooping betimes into the trite.
Now come we in our cars to chew your stodge,
buy petrol—ludicrously over-priced—
take part in orgies in your Travelodge,
and moan about your toilets not being nice.
Leigh Delamere, I’ve been your Porlock too.
I’ve visited your stately pleasure dome
skidmarked your nylon sheets and blocked your loos,
stolen your towels and buggered off back home.
For these foul desecrations, let this be,
Leigh Delamere, my true apology.

“Leigh Delamere is a motorway service station on the M4 between Bristol and London. To my mind the name sounds rather like one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s chums, and that’s the basis for the sonnet. Its technical publication history is that it survived for about a year as a TripAdvisor review of Leigh Delamere Service Station, getting several likes, before the powers-that-were noticed and removed it.”