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VACU VIN I don't know how many sad people there are in the world but it is over twenty five million. I don't mean sad 'miserable' I mean sad 'pathetic'. How do I know this? Read on.      Having picked up a magazine in the doctor's waiting room yesterday and reading that Mafeking had been relieved I looked around for a periodical that might be a bit more up-to-date. On finding one and glancing through it I saw an advertisement for a Vacu Vin. If you have never come across a Vacu Vin, and I sincerely hope you haven't and never will, it is apparently a device which you insert into the neck of an opened wine bottle in order to prevent the wine from oxidising if, in the words of the manufacturer of the Vacu Vin, 'you don't want to finish the bottle'.      If you don't want to finish the bottle? Bacchus would turn in his grave. I can honestly say that I have never once in my sixty-eight years on this Earth, forty-eight of them as a regular wine drinker, opened a decent bottle of wine and not wanted to finish it. Furthermore I can't visualise the time when I ever will open a decent bottle of wine and not want to finish it. Indeed if you were to try to stop me finishing it once I had opened it you would have to fight me, and you'd better be good because if in any danger of losing my bottle of instant happiness I would fight back tooth and nail. Only the intervention of death would stop me finishing a decent bottle of wine once I'd opened it, and even then it would have to be a quick death or I would breathe my last along with the dregs from the bottom of the bottle.      Conversely I have quite often opened a crap bottle of wine and not wanted to finish it - sometimes because it was oxidised, but more likely because it was some Australian rubbish I had been conned into buying through reading an over-enthusuastic review from some wine writer who should no better - but in those cases while it is true to say I didn't want to finish it it is equally true that I didn't want to keep it either, I wanted to pour it down the sink, so why would I need a Vacu Vin?      Surely nobody had been daft enough to buy such a totally useless article? When I got home I got Vacu Vin's number from what passes as Directory Enquiries nowadays and gave them a ring. I asked them if they'd ever sold any. They had. Up to press they 'had sold over twenty five million of them, worldwide, since they were first introduced'.      And that's why I know there are over twenty five million sad people in the world; because what else would a person be if not sad if they didn't want to finish a bottle of wine once they'd opened it?      Writing this has made me sad (but sad 'miserable' not sad 'pathetic'), so I am now going to open a bottle of wine and drown my sorrows in it. And I will definitely not be needing the services of a Vacu Vin.