Scottish Travels & Book Haul: Wigtown, Arran, Islay and Glasgow
When I was a kid, one-week vacations were rare and precious – Orlando or Raleigh for my dad’s church conferences, summer camp in Amish-country Pennsylvania, spring break with my sister in California – and I mourned them when they were over. As an adult, I find that after a week I’m ready to be home … and yet just days after we got back from Scotland, I’m already wondering why I thought everyday life was so great. Oh well. I like to write up my holidays because otherwise it’s all too easy to forget them. This one had fixed start and end points – several days of beetle recording in Galloway for my husband; meeting up with my sister and nephew in Glasgow one evening the next week – and we filled in the intervening time with excursions to two new-to-us Scottish islands; we’re slowly collecting them all.
First Stop, Wigtown
Hard to believe it had been over five years since our first trip to Wigtown. The sleepy little town had barely changed; a couple of bookshops had closed, but there were a few new ones I didn’t remember from last time. The weather was improbably good, sunny and warm enough that I bought a pair of cutoffs at the Community Shop. Each morning my husband set off for bog or beach or wood for his fieldwork and I divided the time until he got back between bits of paid reviewing, reading and book shopping. Our (rather spartan) Airbnb apartment was literally a minute’s walk into town and so was a perfect base.
I paced myself and parcelled out the eight bookshops and several other stores that happen to sell books across the three and a bit days that I had. It felt almost like living there – except I would have to ration my Reading Lasses visits, as a thrice-weekly coffee-and-cake habit would soon get expensive as well as unhealthy. (I spent more on books than on drinks and cakes over the week, though only ~25% more: £44 vs. £32.)
I also had the novelty of seeing my husband interact with his students when we were invited to a barbecue at one’s family home on the Mull of Galloway – and realizing that we’re almost certainly closer in age to the mum than to the student. Getting there required two rural bus journeys to the middle of nowhere, an experience all in itself.
‘Pro’ tips: New Chapter Books was best for bargains, with sections for 50p and £1 paperbacks and free National Geographics. Well-Read Books was good for harder-to-find fiction: among my haul were two Jane Urquhart novels, and the owner was knowledgeable and pleasant. Byre Books carries niche subjects and has scant opening hours, but I procured two poetry collections and a volume of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals. The Old Bank Bookshop and The Bookshop are the two biggest shops; wander for an hour or more if you can. The Open Book tends to get castoffs from other shops and withdrawn library stock, but I still made two purchases and ended up being the first customer for the week’s hosts: Debbie and Jenny, children’s book authors and long-distance friends from opposite coasts of the USA. Overall, I was pleased with my novella, short story and childhood memoir acquisitions. A better haul than last time.
‘Celebrity’ sightings: On our walk down to the bird hide on the first evening, we passed Jessica Fox, an American expat who’s been influential in setting up the literary festival and The Open Book. She gave us a cheery “hello.” I also spotted Ben of The Bookshop Band twice, once in Reading Lasses and another time on his way to the afternoon school run. Both times he had the baby in tow and I decided not to bother him, not even to introduce myself as one of their Patreon supporters.
On our last morning in town, we lucked out and found Shaun Bythell behind the counter at The Bookshop. He’d just taken delivery of a book-print kilt his staff surprised him by ordering with his credit card, and Nicky (not as eccentric as she’s portrayed in Diary of a Bookseller; she’s downright genteel, in fact) had him model it. He posted a video to Facebook that includes The Open Book hosts on the 23rd, if you wish to see it, and his new cover photo shows him and his staff members wearing the jackets that match the kilt. I bought a few works of paperback fiction and then got him to sign my own copies of two of his books.
As last time, he was chatty and polite, taking an interest in our travels and exhorting us to come back sooner than five years next time. I congratulated him on his success and asked if we could expect more books. He said that depends on his publisher, who worry the market is saturated at the moment, though he has another SIX YEARS of diaries in draft form and the Remainders of the Day epilogue would be quite different if he wrote it now. Tantalizing!
Note to self: Next time, plan to be in town through a Friday evening – we left at noon, so I was sad to miss out on a Beth Porter (the other half of The Bookshop Band) children’s songs concert at Foggie Toddle Books at 3:00, followed by a low-key cocktail party at The Open Book at 5:30 – but not until a Monday, as pretty much everything shuts that day. How I hope someone buys Reading Lasses (the owner is retiring) and maintains the café’s high standard!
Appropriate reading: I read the first third of Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Five Red Herrings because it’s set in the area (first line: “If one lives in Galloway, one either fishes or paints”), and found it entertaining, though not enough to care whodunnit. In general, I’m terrible for trying mystery series and DNFing or giving up after the first book. Lord Peter Wimsey seemed like he’d be an amusing detective in the Sherlock Holmes vein, but the rendering of Scottish accents was OTT and the case relied too much on details of train schedules and bicycles.
Arran
Our short jaunt to Arran started off poorly with a cancelled ferry sailing, leaving us stranded in Ardrossan (which Bythell had almost prophetically dubbed a “sh*thole” that morning!) for several hours until the next one, and we struggled with a leaky rear tyre and showery weather for much of the time, but we were still enamoured with this island that calls itself “Scotland in miniature.” That was particularly delightful for me because I come from the state nicknamed “America in miniature,” Maryland. This Airbnb was plush by comparison, we obtained excellent food from the Blackwater Bakehouse and a posh French takeaway, and we enjoyed walks at the Machrie stone circles and Brodick Castle as well as at the various bays (one with a fossilized dinosaur footprint) that we stopped off at on our driving tour.
Appropriate reading: The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle by Kirsty Wark, the only Arran-set novel on my library’s catalogue, is an enjoyable dual-timeline story linked by the Lamlash home of the title character. When she died in her nineties in 2006, she bequeathed her home to a kind woman who used to walk past on summer holidays with her daughter in a pram. Martha Morrison was that baby, and with her mother, Anna, suffering from dementia, it’s up to her to take possession and root out Elizabeth’s secrets. Every other chapter is a first-person fragment from Elizabeth’s memoir, cataloguing her losses of parents and lovers and leading ever closer to the present, when she befriended Saul, an American Buddhist monk based at Holy Island across the water, and Niall, a horticulturist at Brodick Castle. It’s a little too neat how the people in her life pair off (sub-Maggie O’Farrell; more Joanna Trollope, perhaps), but it was fun to be able to visualize the settings and to learn about Arran’s farming traditions and wartime history. 
Islay
Islay is a tourist mecca largely because of its nine distilleries – what a pity we don’t care for whiskey! – but we sought it out for its wildlife and scenery, which were reminiscent of what we saw in the Outer Hebrides last year. Our B&B was a bit fusty (there was a rotary phone in the hall!), but we had an unbeatable view from our window and enjoyed visiting two RSPB reserves. The highlight for me was the walk to the Mull of Oa peninsula and the cow-guarded American Monument, which pays tribute to the troops who died in two 1918 naval disasters – a torpedoed boat and a shipwreck – and the heroism of locals who rescued survivors.
We spent a very rainy Tuesday mooching from one distillery shop to another. There are two gin-makers whose products we were eager to taste, but we also relished our mission to buy presents for two landmark birthdays, one of an American friend who’s a whiskey aficionado. Even having to get the tyre replaced didn’t ruin the day. There’s drink aplenty on Islay, but quality food was harder to acquire, so if we went back we’d plump for self-catering.
Incidental additional hauls: I found this 50th anniversary Virago tote bag under a bench at Bowmore harbour after our meal at Peatzeria. I waited a while to see if anyone would come back for it, but it was so sodden and sandy that it must have been there overnight. I cleaned it up and brought home additional purchases in it: two secondhand finds at a thrift store in Tarbert, the first town back on the mainland, and a Knausgaard book I got free with my card points from a Waterstones in Glasgow.
Glasgow
My 15-year-old nephew is currently on a school trip to Scotland and my sister went along as an unofficial chaperone. I couldn’t let them come to the UK without meeting up, so for months we’d pencilled in an evening in Glasgow. When we booked our Airbnb room in a suburb, it was because it was on a super-convenient train line … which happened to be closed for engineering works while we were there. Plan B: rail replacement buses, which were fine. We greatly enjoyed the company of Santos the Airbnb cat, who mugged us for scraps of our breakfasts.
With our one day in Glasgow, we decided to prioritize the Burrell Collection, due to the enthusiastic recommendations from Susan, our Arran hosts, and Bill Bryson in Notes on a Small Island (“Among the city’s many treasures, none shines brighter, in my view”). It’s a museum with a difference, housed in a custom-built edifice that showcases the wooded surroundings as much as the stunning objects. We were especially partial to the stained glass.
Our whistle-stop city tour also included a walk past the cathedral, a ramble through the Necropolis (where, pleasingly, I saw a grave for one Elizabeth Pringle), and the Tenement Museum, a very different sort of National Trust house that showed how one woman, a spinster and hoarder, lived in the first half of the 20th century. Then on to an exceptional seafood-heavy meal at Kelp, also recommended by Susan, and an all-too-brief couple of hours with my family at their hotel and a lively pub.
We keep returning to Scotland. Where next in a few years? Possibly the southern islands of the Outer Hebrides, which we didn’t have time for last year, or the more obscure of the Inner Hebrides, before planning return visits to some favourites. All the short ferry rides were smooth this time around, so I can cope with the thought of more.
We got home to find our mullein plants attempting to take over the world.
A Trip to Wigtown, Scotland’s Book Town
Wigtown is tucked away in the southwest corner of Scotland in Galloway, a region that doesn’t draw too many tourists. It did remind us a lot of Hay-on-Wye, the Book Town in Wales, what with the dry-stone walls, rolling green hills with more imposing mountains behind, sheep in the fields, and goodly number of bookshops. Wigtown is a sleepier place – it’s really just one main street and square – and has fewer bookshops and eateries overall, but the shops it does have are mainly large and inviting, and several are lovely bookshops-cum-cafés where you can pause for tea/coffee and cake before continuing with your book browsing. It rained for much of our trip and even snowed on a couple of brief occasions, but we got one day of very good weather and made the best of all the rest.
Day 1, Monday the 2nd: Six-plus hours of driving, partially in the sleet and snow, saw us arriving to our spacious and comfortable B&B by 6 p.m., giving us an hour to freshen up before dinner in the dining room. Cullen skink (leek and potato soup with chunks of smoked haddock); pork chops in a mustard cream sauce with roast parsnips, boiled potatoes and carrots, and mashed swede (aka rutabaga); and chocolate cake with gingerbread sauce. All delicious!
Day 2, Tuesday the 3rd: Smoked salmon and scrambled eggs for breakfast, accompanied by plenteous tea and toast. Off in the drizzle to see some local sites: Torhouse stone circle and Crook of Baldoon RSPB bird reserve. Nice sightings of whooper swans, pink-footed geese and lapwings, and a panoramic view of Wigtown across the way. Back to the car in the steady rain to find that we had a flat tire. Thanks to our foot pump, we got back to the W. Barclay garage in town, where they ordered a new tire and fitted the spare wheel. In the afternoon we drove to the Isle of Whithorn to see the 13th-century St. Ninian’s Chapel ruins and St. Ninian’s Cave. In the evening we went to Craft for beer/cider and the weekly acoustic music night, which, alas, just ended up being two old guys playing Americana songs on guitars.
Today’s book shopping: Glaisnock Café, where we also stopped for coffee and a tasty slice of courgette and avocado cake; The Open Book (run by Airbnb customers – this week it was Maureen from Pennsylvania and her niece Rebecca from Switzerland; they’d booked the experience two years ago, and the wait is now up to three years); the Wigtown Community shop (a charity shop); and browsing at Old Bank Books and Byre Books.
I loved seeing lots of Bookshop Band merchandise around. This was in the Festival Shop.
Day 3, Wednesday the 4th: Vegetarian ‘full Scottish’ cooked breakfast to fuel us for a rainy day of bookshops and explorations further afield. 12 p.m.: return trip to the garage to have our tire fitted. All the staff were so friendly and pleasant. They seemed delighted to see tourists around, and were interested in where we came from and what we were finding to do in the area. Mr. Barclay himself had one of the thickest Scottish accents I’ve ever heard, but I managed to decipher that he thinks of Galloway as “the next best place to heaven,” despite the weather. We spotted a local ‘celebrity’, Ben of the Bookshop Band, in the Co-op, but didn’t say hello as he was trying to pay for his shopping and had the baby in tow.
In the afternoon we ventured to Newton Stewart, the nearest big town, to buy petrol, picnic supper food, and another secondhand book at the community shop there. We retreated from the sudden snow for a scrumptious dinner of smoked salmon, black pudding and haggis (all of them battered and fried, with chips!) at a diner-like smokehouse. Back in Wigtown, we got a mainly dry evening to do the Martyrs’ Walk. In 1685 two Covenanters (Scottish reformers who broke from Charles I’s Anglican Church), Margaret McLachlan, 63, and Margaret Wilson, 18, were tied to stakes on the mud flats and allowed to drown in the rising tide.
Today’s book shopping: THE BOOKSHOP. I’ve meant to visit ever since I read Jessica Fox’s memoir, Three Things You Need to Know about Rockets, in February 2013. Previously based in California, Fox decided on a whim to visit a bookshop in Scotland and ended up here at the country’s largest. She promptly fell in love with the bookshop owner and with Wigtown itself; though she and Shaun Bythell are no longer an item, she has been a major mover and shaker in the town, playing a role in the annual festival and establishing The Open Book.
The Bookshop is a wonderfully rambling place with lots of nooks and crannies housing all sorts of categories. Look out for the shot and mounted Kindle, the Festival bed, the stuffed badger, a scroll of bookseller’s rules, Captain the cat, and a display of Bythell’s The Diary of a Bookseller. Together we found £35 worth of books we wanted to buy – whew! – thanks to my husband’s niche nature books, and had a nice chat with the man himself at the till. He signed my book, commiserated with us about the weather and our trip to see “Willie” (Barclay), and gave us tips for what to see locally. You’d hardly believe he’s the same curmudgeon who wrote the book. Now that I’ve been to the town and the shop, it’s time for me to start rereading it.
We also perused the smallish but very nice selection at Beltie Books, where we made a welcome stop for a cappuccino and some cookies, and I bought a cut-price new book at the Festival Shop. (They stock books by festival speakers plus a curated selection of new releases.)
Day 4, Thursday the 5th: SUNSHINE, at last! After hearty omelettes, we headed to the hill that overlooks the town to get the best views of the week. On to Monreith for a charming coastal walk up to the Gavin Maxwell monument of a bronze otter. (He wrote Ring of Bright Water, which my husband brought along to read on our trip.) After a lunch stop back in town, it was out to the red kite feeding station about 40 minutes away – I came for the books; my husband came for the red kites. Though they’re common enough in our part of Berkshire, he was keen to see the site of another recent reintroduction. Wales also has a feeding station we visited some years ago, and on both occasions seeing dozens of birds swoop down for meat was quite the spectacle – though here you sit on an open porch, even closer to the action. We did a few other short walks in the area, finishing off with a sunset sit in Wigtown’s bird hide.
Today’s book shopping: ReadingLasses calls itself Britain’s only women’s bookshop. They stock Persephone Books direct from Bloomsbury, and they also have a large selection of secondhand books. This is the best place to go in town for a light meal and a snack. We had delicious homemade soup with soda bread for an early lunch, followed by coffee and tiffin. I bought a novel by Candia McWilliam, a Scottish author I’ve only read nonfiction by before.
At Curly Tale Books, the children’s bookshop next-door to The Bookshop, we bought a picture book about the local ‘belted’ Galloway cows for our niece. We didn’t realize the shop owner is also the author! She offered to sign the book for us, but we decided that a five-year-old wouldn’t appreciate it enough.
Day 5, Friday the 6th: Full Scottish breakfast to see us on our way, and a farewell to the two B&B cats, including the fluffiest cat on earth. To break up the rather arduous journey, we stopped early on at the Cairn Holy stone circle/tomb and the Cream o’ Galloway farm shop for cheese and ice cream. Home at 7:30 p.m. to find something from the freezer for dinner, unpack and shelve all these new books.
Cairn Holy
Total acquisitions: 13 books for me, 7 books for my husband, 3 books for gifts
Wigtown is more than twice as far away as Hay is for us, so we’re less likely to go back. (It’s also a tough place to find a decent evening meal.) However, I’d like to think that life will take me back to Wigtown someday, perhaps for the Festival, or for a stay at The Open Book – though I’d have to start planning ahead to 2021!
What I read:
Bits of lots of books I had on the go, but mostly a few vaguely appropriate titles:
Under the Skin by Michel Faber was the perfect book for reading on rainy Scottish highways. I’m so glad I decided at the last minute to bring it. Isserley drives along Highland roads picking up hitchhikers – but only the hunky males – to take back to her farm near the Moray Firth. It’s likely that you already know the setup of this even if you haven’t read it, perhaps from the buzz around the 2013 film version starring Scarlett Johansson. It must have been so difficult for the first reviewers and interviewers to discuss the book without spoilers back in 2000. David Mitchell, in his introduction to my Canons series reprint, does an admirable job of suggesting the eeriness of the contents without giving anything significant away.
Shelve this under science fiction, though it veers towards horror and then becomes a telling allegory. I knew the basic plot beforehand, but there were still some surprises awaiting me, and I was impressed with how Faber pulled it all off. Keep an eye open for how he uses the word “human.” This has a lot to say about compassion and dignity, and how despite our differences we are fundamentally the same “under the skin.” 
An atmospheric line: “The fields all around her house were shrouded in snow, with patches of dark earth poking through here and there as if the world were a rich fruit cake under cream.”
Between Stone and Sky: Memoirs of a Waller by Whitney Brown: For a TLS review. Brown, from South Carolina, trained as a dry-stone waller in Wales (where she fell in love with a man who wouldn’t marry her), but we saw plenty such walls in Scotland too. As an expat I could relate to her feeling of being split between two countries. 
(Releases May 17th.)
I
n the Days of Rain: A daughter. A father. A cult. by Rebecca Stott: I read the first two-fifths or so, mostly in the car and over our leisurely B&B breakfasts. One branch of Stott’s Exclusive Brethren family came from Eyemouth, a Scottish fishing village. A family memoir, a bereavement memoir, a theological theme: this brings together a lot of my favorite things. And it won last year’s Costa Biography Award, so you know it’s got to be good.
I also started two books by Scottish novelists, The Orchard on Fire by Shena Mackay and The Accidental by Ali Smith – though I don’t know if I’ll make it through the latter.
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
So you think you’d like to run a bookshop? Here’s a book to tempt and deter you in equal measure. In 2001 Shaun Bythell acquired The Bookshop, the flagship bookstore in Wigtown, the Book Town in Galloway in the southwest of Scotland. Here he gives a one-year snapshot of life at the shop, from February 2014 to February 2015. At the start you can feel the winter chill in the old granite building, and as months pass you sense mounting excitement at preparations for the annual Book Festival (going on now) and the Scottish referendum. It’s a pleasure to spend a vicarious year at the shop. This would make a great bedside book for a bookish type to parcel out 5–10 pages at a time (another Christmas gift idea?).
Bythell frequently ventures out to buy book collections in auctions and from estates, and occasionally goes fishing with his father or friends. But mostly we see what daily life is like for a bookshop owner. He can’t afford full-time staff, so gets sporadic help from university-age gals; his most “reliable” part-timer is Nicky, a ski suit-wearing, Dumpster-diving Jehovah’s Witness who blithely ignores much of what he asks her to do.
Every entry opens and closes with statistics on the day’s takings and online orders. Profits range from £5 to £500 a day, rising in the summer and peaking around £1200 during the festival. Also listed is the number of customers who make purchases, which represents only one-fifth of daily footfall. Nowadays most bookstores sell online too, and The Bookshop reluctantly partners with Amazon as a marketplace seller. There’s also ABE and eBay; as a last-ditch option, some outfits take books in bulk, even if just to recycle them. Alongside online sales, it’s essential for bookstores to have sidelines. Bythell does video production and sells furniture, antiques and walking sticks carved by “Sandy, the tattooed pagan.”
As with Wendy Welch’s The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, I enjoyed the nitty-gritty details about acquiring and pricing books, especially the serendipitous moments of coming across real treasures, like a book signed by Sir Walter Scott and a 1679 edition of the Decameron with an interesting provenance. The book is also full of quirky customer behavior, the kind of stuff that fills The Bookshop’s Facebook feed. Bythell cultivates a curmudgeonly persona – he once shot a broken Kindle and mounted it on the bookshop wall – and maintains a tone that’s somewhere between George Orwell (excerpts from whose “Bookshop Memories” serve as monthly epigraphs) and Jen Campbell (Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops et al.). Here’s a few of the best encounters:
a whistling customer with a ponytail and what I can only assume was a hat he’d borrowed from a clown bought a copy of Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist, I suspect deliberately to undermine my faith in humanity and dampen my spirits further.
A man smelling of TCP [antiseptic] was the only customer in the shop for the first hour of opening, during which time I attempted to put out fresh stock. He had an uncanny ability to be standing in front of every shelf to which I needed access, regardless of the subject or where in the shop the relevant shelves were.
While I was repairing a broken shelf in the crime section, I overheard an elderly customer confusing E. L. James and M. R. James while discussing horror fiction with her friend. She is either going to be pleasantly surprised or deeply shocked when she gets home with the copy of Fifty Shades of Grey she bought.
I’ve been to Hay-on-Wye six times now but haven’t made it to Wigtown yet. It’s high on my bookish wish list. I had two additional reasons for wanting to read this particular book: I’d read Three Things You Need to Know about Rockets, a memoir by Bythell’s former partner, the American Jessica Fox (here known as “Anna”; in her book he’s “Ewan”), about coming to Scotland on a whim and falling in love with a bookshop owner; and I’m awfully fond of The Bookshop Band, a folky husband–wife musical duo who this year relocated from Bath to Wigtown. It was such fun to read about their first time playing in Wigtown and their stay as the inaugural guests/temporary store managers via The Open Book Airbnb project.
Colin Kinnear [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Book Shop trivia:
- December is by far the quietest month. (“The few people who give second-hand books as gifts for Christmas are usually eccentric” – count me as one of them!)
- Railway books sell best.
- Terry Pratchett, John Buchan, P.G. Wodehouse and E.F. Benson books are also perennial best sellers.
- You’ll be amazed at how many customers try to haggle over prices. It’s a shop, not a rummage sale, for goodness’ sake! I can’t imagine ever having the cheek to offer less than the advertised price.
My rating:
The Diary of a Bookseller was released in the UK on September 28th. My thanks to Profile Books for the free review copy.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
Random Blog Searches and Spam Comments
I should have another batch of summer books read and reviewed by Friday. To fill in until then, I’ve resuscitated a recurring post template that I haven’t used in over three years, looking at the random searches that have led people to my blog. (Previously surveyed in May 2016, October 2016 and June 2017.)
I keep a record of the most interesting or bizarre blog searches that show up on my dashboard. Some recent favorites are below. I may not have the dirt on a new Donna Tartt release, but some of those who came with an inquiring mind will have found answers to their questions on my site.
(Spelling and punctuation are unedited throughout!)
2018
June 23: heart surgery vs brain surgery, elderberry cordial nancy Mitford
September 8: eve schaub rag rug
October 9: i hate elena ferrante
December 20: shaun bythell partner
December 27: philip carey leg
February 8: julia buckley journalist friend with a witchdoctor
March 30: was mel love with sharon animators
April 17: parker fiske – eleanor roosevelt’s cousin
May 31: is donna tartt writing another novel after the goldfinch
September 10: reservoir 13 who did it
October 22: sample inscription in cookbook for a bride
2019
March 19: the heart’s invisible furies spoilers, culling books
2020
January 19: vikram paralkar night theatre stinks, is megan phelps roper a jehovahs witness
March 30: miochel faber interview, did shaun bythell marry jess ica fox, why did mary give thatcher a gift in the novel unsheltered
April 17: bitter orange symbolism, books under 50 pages, cystic fibrosis stevenson helen, nuts in may louis macneice
April 28: essays on comparing the novels empire falls by richard russo and cat’s eye by margaret wood
July 6: christianne ritter aurhor what became of her and her husband
Lots of curiosity about Shaun Bythell’s romantic history – my review of The Diary of a Bookseller continues to be one of my most-viewed posts. I think my favorite search, though, is “i hate elena ferrante” (hate is too strong a word, but I do remain indifferent to her charms).
I regularly check my spam folder because, every once in a while, a regular commenter’s message goes astray there and I’d hate to miss anything genuine.
In the last month I’ve noticed hundreds of spam comments on my blog, all containing identical Spanish-language text (“Muchas gracias. ?Como puedo iniciar sesion?”) and usually appearing on one of four particular posts.
Any ideas about how I can get the Spanish spam to go away?