One Fort in the Grave, with KEITH FORT

IT HAS become important to remember to include one essential when you fill your cases for the holidays: a pen.

This has nothing to do with writing home. It's to fill in all those questionnaires. These days a 14-day holiday seems to comprise 90 per cent enjoyment and 10 per cent form-filling. If you can be bothered, that is.

But have you noticed how forcefully these information sheets are demanded from you? Some firms do it with inducements - "Win a free holiday." Some do it by demand, especially on the plane home - "Where's your questionnaire?" For my last holiday I spent a week on a ship and a week in a Spanish hotel and I was confronted by eight questionnaires. If I had spent the time filling them all in it would have felt more like answering a multiple question A-level than having a holiday.

We don't mind giving an assessment of our holiday. In fact when things are excellent or dire we positively relish the opportunity to say so. So you begin to tick the boxes on page one, marking the "excellent" the "good" and "fair" and the "poor" as the case may be.

Then you turn the page and find they want to know your age group, how you booked, who with, whether you were ill and, bizarrely, what the weather was like.

Then a bit more -- are you a professional (I bet some girls have fun with that!), a manual worker, or are you retired? (If I wasn't I wouldn't have time to fill all this in). Now we're being led to the crunch questions. Earnings bracket? Which newspapers do you read? Which stores do you visit? Do you have life insurance? What do you have for breakfast? Which loo rolls do you use? Do you pick your teeth and, if so, what with? Oh! And don't forget to add your name and address, post code and phone number.

What in blazes has all this to do with your holiday? Not much. But it has a lot to do with finding out about you.

The holiday company has obtained lots of detailed and personal information about thousands, if not millions, of holidaymakers. What cars they drive, newspapers they read, products they use, insurance they possess, how much they earn, how many holidays a year they can afford, and so on.

I can imagine scores of commercially interested organisations and companies who would pay very good money for such information -- information about yourself that you have volunteered freely.

And if you've been filling in these forms you may well wonder where some of your junk mail comes from. And there's you thinking you were just being nice and answering a holiday questionnaire.

Recently, alert ordinary folk have used people power via the internet to force the government into a u-turn over allowing government agencies and organisations to snoop into the remaining aspects of our lives. The message is: don't give it away free.

So when the holiday company asks: Are you likely to take your next holiday with us? the answer should be: Not if I have to fill in forms like these.

On our last holiday we had to mark the ship's crew for efficiency, politeness, service etc. Then we had to list the names of the top four crew members in our opinion.

Sounds simple enough - but most of the crew were Russian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Greek or Polish!