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V.Wright was the turf accountant of the novel’s hero, Stephen Dedalus, a layabout student whose life centred around smoking, dreaming and getting horseracing tips through the post from the “Backer’s Friend” in Newmarket.
“Sensational news” was always reaching V.Wright’s ear. “Information from the RIGHT QUARTER” was always shared with those willing to send him a bob in the mail. “Leaving me now because of bad luck would indeed be a ‘puzzler’,” he writes after his latest “GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY” comes in last. “It is very comforting to know that I have clients who are sportsmen who do not lose heart when the luck is ‘the wrong way’.” To get back in winning form he tells his customers to “GO IN FOR THE WIN OF YOUR LIFE” with his “treble nap CAST-IRON PLUNGER… Old friends will know that I do not send ‘guessworks’ but only STRICTLY OCCASIONAL advices over animals already as good as past the post… P.S. The above will be the business. Yours, Verney.’”
Good ol’ Verney. I thought of him last week as the Cheltenham Festival unfolded. The real-life, modern-day equivalent of Verney are those characters who advertise their premium-rate telephone tipping lines in the Racing Post every day. It is extraordinary how similar they are to Verney. Almost 70 years after At Swim-Two-Birds was published, they use a lot of the same kind of language and display the same sense of certainty about their “good things” as he did. But are their tips any better? That’s what I wanted to discover. Are they any more liable to make a profit or are they as much in the dark as the rest of us?

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