I went hiking a couple times with, among others, a dude who's been in climbing and mountaineering since the eighties at least, and was like sixty at the time. This is in Russia, so in the eighties you just couldn't buy anything in the shops, and only something via the black market. At a train platform, we met another guy like that, and it was battle story time: that guy showed us a backpack hand-made from tarpaulin, which is of course a bit of the opposite of light hiking. Our guy related the story of his climbing rope, to obtain which you had to go through a hole in the fence of a factory, then walk on the roof to a certain door, knock and say ‘I'm here to see Mikhail, about this thing and that other thing’.

Meanwhile here I am trying to gather courage to hand-fix holes in the accumulated twenty pairs of socks, and then graduate to the more involved things. Bit of a nuisance that every Youtube video on how to fix this kind of holes just says that darning is the answer. Come on, I know how darning is gonna turn out with my skills—surely there's a crappier but simpler alternative.