THE WEEKENDER: Will we get our money back at the pumps?

By 'us', I mean motorists, the millions of us who cannot help but think we have been having our pockets picked at the pumps for years, but haven't been able to do anything about it.

With plush corporate offices being raided across London, one can almost feel the hands of oil company executives shaking beneath the cuffs of their expensive shirts.

But while it is all very well for political big guns like Prime Minister David Cameron to rumble on ominously about bringing "the full force of the law" down on any individual and any company found guilty of price fixing, I can't help thinking that those of us who use allegedly overpriced petrol will get nothing back.

If petrol has been overpriced, where has the money gone? Most probably into the coffers of the companies involved, and by extension the pockets of their senior staff and shareholders in the form of bonuses.

Ah, bonuses. Time was, the 'B' word meant something else entirely, something derogatory that after the initial 'b', was suggested by the liberal use of asterisks and exclamation marks.

Not any more. Bonuses is the dirty word that family newspapers such as this can utter.

And if these allegations are eventually proven, these bonuses should be paid back. Some sort of scheme should be devised whereby prices are lowered for a suitable length of time to enable us hard-pressed drivers to get back some of the money we are owed.

Also, if oil prices have been fixed, and petrol prices have been subsequently higher than they should have been, it must follow that the tax take from these prices has been higher than it should have been.

I know it is early days but I've not heard Mr Cameron, who spoke long and loud on the subject earlier this week, offer motorists a fuel tax cut to make up for the Treasury robbing us blind, however inadvertently.

All of which gives a whole new meaning to the term 'oil rig.'

Again, these allegations remain to be proven, but some sort of payback would be nice.

Ironic too, isn't it, that it has taken action from European authorities to put this matter back on the agenda, four months after the Office of Fair Trading declared after a paltry 12-week 'investigation' that competition in the oil pricing sector was "working well."

Because if the UK were no longer a part of the European Union, a situation an awful lot of us appear to want, the chances of Us letting Them meddle in our business affairs would be zero-ish, and such a price fixing investigation would be unlikely to happen on such a scale.

I'll stay a paperback reader

LIKE many other techno-refuseniks, I have gradually yielded to the march of the gadget - the mobile phone, the iPod, and sooner rather than later I suspect, the tablet.

But I cannot ever see myself using a Kindle or other device to read a novel or collection of poetry from.

There just seems to be something fundamentally not right about it.

Research from the National Literacy Trust published this week suggests that these devices may be hindering children's ability to read.

Almost 35,000 eight-16 year-olds were quizzed about their reading habits and the study found that those who use electronic books every day are likely to be weaker readers, and to enjoy reading much less.

A victory for true bookworms then? Perhaps.

But what this study does not seem to get to the bottom of is the reason why e-books and the like have this effect.

And that is important, because more and more children are casting aside traditional reading materials in favour of technology.

The study reveals that while adults have been trailblazers in the use of Kindle and suchlike devices, the number of young digitial readers has doubled in the past two years.

So if there is a negative consequence of this shift, it is vital the cause is identified and examined.

Me, I'll stick to the dog-eared paperback and the broken-spined hardback for my literary thrills.