BIC 4 colour pen, part 2

Following on from last week’s blog post about the BIC 4 colour pen, this week Tracey Pawley, from AUB Finance, has written about her recollections of this classic plastic design.

 

I owned my first BIC 4-colour pen in the mid-80s. My family moved house just before my ninth birthday and with that came a change in school. My previous school was very old-fashioned and once we had progressed from pencil to pen, all writing was done in a traditional font using a refillable fountain pen - often leaking ink all over our hands, desks and pink blotting paper. My new school felt so bright and modern in comparison, and I was to now use a biro in the classroom. I purposefully altered the way I wrote some letters to embrace the change. To go from one to four colours at a click felt somewhat exotic. Unlike the 10-colour pen, which I dabbled with at one point, the BIC 4-colour was a perfect size for my grip, and had the balance of offering multiple colours, but not too many.

Some of my BIC 4-colour pens.
Image credit: Neil Pawley

Both the feeling and sound of the click as you change colours are very reassuring and pleasing to me to this day. Basically, the 4-colour BIC was a precursor to both fidget toys and ASMR, all rolled into one handy, colourful package that you can write or draw with!

Although some of the designs BIC offers nowadays are stunning, the classic blue will always be my favourite. My husband Neil shares my love of nostalgia and included one in my Christmas stocking some years ago now – the first 4-colour pen I had owned in over 25 years. My collection expanded from one to seven in one fell swoop about three years ago. My work buddy Vicky had bought a 6-pen set in a holder shaped like one of the pens for her daughter and, on seeing my longing for one too, made a return trip to Asda to pick one up for me. Sadly, the holder (which had a unicorn on it) didn’t survive me dropping it, but I have an Instagram post for posterity. I bought myself an eighth pen, in bright yellow, just recently for no reason other than yellow things make me happy and it reminds me of a daisy.

Instagram photo of my unicorn holder, taken in the old finance office at AUB.
Image credit: Tracey Pawley

As well as the smaller blue pen I keep in my handbag, I have several 4-colour pens in the kitchen for jotting down shopping lists or updating our calendar, another two or three in the living room with various puzzle books, and - although AUB Finance is now paper-free - I always have the rest of my pens to hand on my desk for jotting down to-do lists or notes, or for multi-coloured doodling. They stand in a silicone cat pencil case, a gift from my work chum, Sally. It must be said I have terrible handwriting, but I don’t blame that on my choice of pen.

Tracey Pawley has worked in AUB Finance for 6 years and is one half of a performance and sound art duo called Language, Timothy!