Hello, and welcome to The Shoebox Archive. I am Nilanthi Jayawardena, I am a librarian in Colombo, and I am surrounded right now by about forty labelled boxes, which my family finds less charming than I do. This is a show about collecting, the small kind. Stamps, coins, matchbox labels, bus tickets, anything people keep in tins and drawers and wonder if anyone else does too. For the first episode I have the album my uncle, a postman, gave me in 1989 when I was nine. I will read you what I wrote inside the cover, tell you about the first stamp I ever soaked off an envelope from Kuwait, and explain how that habit became a catalogued archive and a career. At the end, three rules for starting. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.