Short Stories

Saturday 13th November 2021. The water of the oceans, our way of life on a sailing boat, as well as the problems we all share connect us sailors, whether aboard a large modern yacht or a small, robust globetrotter boat, like mine. All of us will at some point face a blocked carburettor on the motor sailer, the batteries sometimes give us trouble, or the fridge isn‘t working. We spend a lot of time at sea, share the waters with the boat and its crew. Sailing into an unknown port or bay I will usually not know anyone. This is …

Saturday 6th November 2021. The global sailing community is something very special indeed. Surrendering yourself completely to all winds and weathers that sailors are dependent on for survival requires a different kind of „lifestyle“ than the one you’d have on dry land in a big city. Which is why sailors are as thick as thieves. This sticking together has a deeper meaning, described by Boris Herrmann in his new book, „Alone between Sky and Sea“, which has just been published in German by Bertelsmann and will surely soon be available in English, French and Portuguese translation. A bestseller in Germany, …

Saturday 30th October 2021. Who determines our future? ECO123 accompanies interesting people on their journeys and puts their ideas up for discussion. Round-the-world sailor Boris Herrmann starts his book on the Vendeé Globe with a realisation: „Sailing is not a sport. Sailing is adventure, getting to know yourself better, experiencing the wonders of nature.“ The protagonist of ECO123 ‘s Saturday story is 23-year young Paul Piendl from the Ammersee lake area in Germany who buys a 45-year old sailing yacht in Portugal, hauls it out of the water and painstakingly restores it over the course of many months in a …

Saturday the 23rd of October 2021. …so, who really determines our future when we have a threat hanging over us which knocks on the door of our consciousness on a daily basis – yet one that most people don’t want to let in under any circumstances? Most Europeans are still successfully blocking this threat from their consciousness. They keep their doors and windows shut tight, especially when it’s about receiving the first refugees fleeing climate destruction and war in Africa who were able to be saved, fished out of the Mediterranean Sea. As if the threat of climate emergency could …

Saturday 2nd October 2021. Climate change. Climate neutral in ten steps? But of course. All we have to do is prepare for it. Every one of us. Whether we’ve learned this or not. Me for instance, my whole long life I’ve grown up with the concept of carrying my trash out to the bin once a week, for the binmen to come and collect it every Thursday. At some stage the concept of waste separation won the day: glass with glass, plastics with plastics, paper with paper, and so on. So I’d place the packaging material into the dedicated waste …

Saturday 2nd October 2021. It all started in June 1991. At that time it lasted for ten days, in 2003 too; in 2004 then five days, and the same in 2016. In 2018 then it went on for seven days. On those days the woods of the Monchique mountains were ablaze, well, whatever remained after each new fire, and every time we were left with a little less forest. During the last blaze the fire destroyed 28,000 hectares, and in 2003 a whopping 43,000 hectares of forest. But what that means you cannot really express by crunching a few numbers. …

Saturday 25th September 2021. About three years ago, a Portuguese journalist asked me to appear on her television program, Guided Tour (Visita Guiada in Portuguese), which aims at introducing viewers to destinations of historical and cultural interest in the country. She wanted to interview me inside St. Dominic’s Church in Lisbon because it was there that the anti-Semitic pogrom began in 1506 that I describe in my bestselling novel The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon.  During the pogrom, which lasted for three days, some 2,000 New Christians – Jews forcibly converted to Christianity nine years earlier – were murdered and burnt …

Saturday 18th September 2021. By now every serious democratic candidate has been given the chance to air their views on the forest fires in a 30-minute unscripted interview. Their replies to the question of what they are intending to do to break the cycle of forest fires in Monchique, or to stop them altogether, makes it look as if they didn’t really have a solution in mind. José Chaparro, Bruno Estremores, João Duarte and Paulo Alves are the four candidates who all want to become mayor, and all of them still have a real chance to make this happen. Unless …