Long and Winding Forthlin Road - home of Beatles legend Paul McCartney

THE scene is Forthlin Road, Allerton, on a beautiful night. A man turns up with his son and knocks on the door of number 20. The man inside answers: “Yeah … can I help yer?”

The visitor says “yeah” back, adding: “I used to live here.”

The resident says: “I’m watching the telly.”

And closes the door.

It’s a great tale. It’s a Beatle tale.

Sir Paul McCartney often comes 'home' and isn’t it ironic someone wouldn’t ‘let him in’.

He’s proud of the place where he moved with mum Mary, Dad Jim and brother Mike in 1955, and where he wrote so many great songs with John Lennon.

Paul's proud that the National Trust made a controversial decision to make a Beatle home a ‘must see’ place back in 1996.

It’s now a National Treasure, like him.

The fabulous pictures by younger brother Mike (born Peter and a fellow student at Liverpool Institute with George Harrison) are on the walls and show the house as it was in the late 50s and 60s.

 Home has always been where the heart is for the McCartney clan.

To walk around the household – like Lennon’s Mendips – it’s all so surreal.

Wind our tape forward

A woman who makes models of houses takes her sketch pad to Forthlin Road

From her drawing she makes a painstaking scaled-down replica of the house.

Mabel Summers of Huyton recreated the number 20 homestead correct in every detail and Mike McCartney gave it the thumbs up when he saw it.

Mabel was so chuffed that she sent a photo of it to Paul just to let him know she’d done it.

Well, would you believe it . . . a few weeks later an envelope arrived at her Knotty Ash house – a signed pic from Paul saying “From Mac to Mabel…Nice One.”

When you leave Forthlin Road you will see a bus go on its way into town – the 86 collects at a bus stop around the corner from Paul's old house.

At one concert in London’s Docklands I saw him standing there – our Paul.

Arms aloft, before his encore, the Scruff from Speke said in a familiar soft Scouse accent: “Got to go, like, we’re getting the 86 bus home.”

The Beatles left Liverpool – they had little choice.

But Liverpool never, ever left The Beatles.