Four stars for the megaphone that cries the news better than me

Four stars out of five. I bought this megaphone on 3 October for 48.90 euros and I have used it eleven times, which for a village of 180 people is a lot: I am the municipal town crier of Villalbín and until now I went round the four streets with nothing but my voice. I bought it so as not to lose my voice in winter, and it turns out it announces better than I do.

The good part. The battery has got me through three announcements in a row without recharging and it can be heard up by the church, which is where Honorino Vilas, the mayor, lives, and where he always said you could not hear a thing.

What I did not expect. The device has a function that records thirty seconds and repeats them in a loop. One Tuesday I recorded the notice about the water being cut off, left it going in the square and went for breakfast. When I came back there were six neighbours writing the time down on a scrap of paper, something I had never managed in fourteen months as crier. The device does not cough, does not get stuck on "attention, attention" and does not say "well, anyway" at the end. It says it once and says it the same way the next nine times.

From then on things got complicated. Elpidio Teijeiro, the caretaker at the sports hall, borrowed it for Sunday bingo and gave it back with his own recording inside. On Monday I announced the bulky waste collection in the square and what came out of the megaphone was "line!" three times, in Elpidio's voice. Two women turned up with their cards.

And on Wednesday the inevitable happened. Honorino stopped me at the town hall with the face of a man who has had an idea and asked me, in those words, whether with a recorder they still needed to pay a town crier. I told him the device does not know when somebody has died, that you cannot leave that on a loop, and he thought about it for longer than I liked.

Summary: if you have to announce things in the street, buy it.

I am docking one star for a manufacturing defect: it cannot cough.