I have used Paul McCartney's outside loo: not many people can say that. I have also been in John Lennon's bedroom and gazed at his pink eiderdown.
Soon I may be able to study the domestic arrangements of a third Beatle if, as has been reported, Ringo's house in one of the Welsh streets in Toxteth, in Liverpool, is demolished brick by brick and re-erected at the controversial new Museum of Liverpool set to rise (when they have found the money) on the city's waterfront.
John's boyhood home, a 30s semi called Mendips on Menlove Avenue, was by far the most posh of the three. His bedroom was only 8ft by 6ft but there he and McCartney composed Please, Please Me, which proves that size isn't everything.
I think it was in the kitchen at Mendips (owned by Lennon's aunt Mimi who told him: "A guitar's all right, John, but you'll never earn a living by it") that a National Trust conservator told of the problems he had had in finding the precise shade of red Formica to match a worktop. Or that could have been in Macca's kitchen at 20 Forthlin Road on a council estate in Speke. Paul, unlike John, had a candlewick bedspread but collective composition happened, not in the bedroom at Forthlin Road but in the sitting room, where the two laboured over I Saw Her Standing Her Standing There.
I was once quite touched as I listened to the Symphonie Fantastique in Berlioz's family home south of Lyon; and what thrills you get from standing in these rooms where big Beatles numbers were penned is up to you. You may, custodians permitting, be happy to stand quietly, shut your eyes and hum gently.
Whether this will work as you intone Octopus's Garden in the reconstruction of 9 Madryn Street in the middle of a new museum is questionable. But it will probably be more meaningful than standing in the Beatles Experience at the Albert Dock as Japanese tourists sob their eyes out in the final room while gazing at a white piano as Imagine grinds out of loudspeakers.
By the way, the plastic toilet seat in Macca's outside netty is not the original: that was pinched by a fan years ago.
