He's now working on a new book about Scapa Flow. James also writes a weekly column in the Inverness Courier, on any subject that takes his fancy. He acts as a tutor for an open-learning course at Inverness College and frequently does drama work. As a member of Highland Poets, he writes poetry and experiments in some poem with using Caithness dialect, for which he has devised spelling system that strives to reproduce on page the sound of the Caithness accent. For a long time now he has been compiling a dictionary of dialect, including research on grammar and etymology.
Life unrolls at forty miles per hour as whins drip gobbets of golden fire.
Kinkell, Shandwick, steep towered Tain. The odds on England are two to one. The Dornoch Firth is a sleeve of blue silk ripped to bare cinnamon sickles of sand. Kicked-off sharp at three o'clock. In the Stag's Head they crack about the rules of pitch and toss, and weight loss, over pints of heavy.