CHOOSING a place to live is all about three things, or so the maxim goes: location, location, location.

If you crave wide open spaces and big skies, then a place in the country would suit. A family home close to a good school? Suburbia beckons.

For all the excitement of modern life on your doorstep, city centre living cannot be beaten. And that is the choice of Nicola Field, who lives in Cherry Hill Lane, York.

This is a great place to be. Just outside the bar walls, within a stone's throw of the river, it puts her a few minutes' walk from the best city centre in England.

This boasts all the shops, bars, restaurants and nightlife you could wish for. Close by in the other direction is Rowntree Park and the Millennium Bridge.

Unsurprisingly, Miss Field's lifestyle is much in demand. While people flee the centre of many other cities, the desire to live at the heart of York is such that developers are building wherever they can gain permission.

But there are drawbacks wherever you live. What city centre residents gain in convenience, they lose in peace and quiet. Traffic, human and vehicular, comes and goes at all hours.

And then, a funfair may start up.

This, says Miss Field, is too much. Her once peaceful evenings are being disturbed by the music, the rides and the sound of people enjoying themselves. The hullabaloo goes on well into the night - well, 9pm - and lasts until the weekend. Then it will be back in little over 11 months' time.

What a fuss about the normal hubbub of city life. If Miss Field and her neighbours cannot bear the racket, they should consider moving out to the silent suburbs. That would take them out of earshot of the fairground, buskers and the Minster chimes too.

York has boasted a city centre fair for nearly a hundred years. Long may it continue to bring us its brand of garish, noisy fun.

Updated: 12:18 Thursday, April 04, 2002