Very Cross in Mersey

'Of course Liverpool is useful. It would be silly if the tunnel from Birkenhead went under the river and ended up in an empty space'

Liverpool has outlived its usefulness as a city, and I think most people in Britain would just wish it would go away." That's what Linda Grant said on Newsnight the other night, and she is certainly right as far as its usefulness as a port is concerned, but do we really wish it wasn't there?

Well, no, of course we don't. Liverpool is useful for at least three reasons.

1) It would be silly if the Mersey Tunnel went under the river from Birkenhead and ended in an empty space.

2) Without Liverpool, you couldn't have the hoary old quiz question: "Which is further east: Liverpool or Edinburgh?" – and yes, Liverpool is the right answer.

3) If you took Liverpool away, you would take away one of the main struts underpinning the memories of my youth.

I grew up on the borders of Cheshire and North Wales, and Liverpool was the nearest big city. Liverpool was where Mum took us when we went for big shopping, like Christmas shopping, as there was a direct train on a pre-Beeching branch line from Wrexham. Liverpool was where we went for concerts and, even better, the Christmas panto outing; Jewell and Warriss, Arthur Askey, Frankie Howerd, Ken Dodd – we saw them all in panto at Liverpool. Tommy Steele, too, but never mind.

Liverpool was also where I had to go to get records when I first fell in love with jazz. Rushworth and Dreaper was the big old-fashioned shop where I started getting 78s, but for LPs I moved on to NEMS, a flashy shop with a very good jazz selection. One day they were playing the same pop record over and over again. And again and again. I asked the sales girl who it was by.

"A new local group," she said. "They're called the Beatles." I listened to "Love Me Do" for a moment, decided they'd never get anywhere and went back to my jazz. What a prophet. And although I never lived there, I came to think of Liverpool as part of my mental scenery – for a treat, my mother would take me and my brother on the Overhead Railway, the wonderful elevated track that ran all the way along the docks with all those huge ships in them, got to (I think) Seaton Sands and came back. And when we went on holiday to Northern Ireland, it was from Liverpool we took the overnight ferry. How could it not stick in my mind?

So I could dimly relate to people who really came from there, such as Geoffrey Dickinson, assistant art editor and my best mate at Punch, who came from Formby and claimed to have grown up next door to Beryl Bainbridge. I was walking up Fleet Street with him one day when he introduced me to the mysterious way Scousers talk. He pointed at a hair salon called Her Hair, explaining that in Liverpool both words are pronounced the same, then adding thoughtfully: "And we think 'Urdu' is another word for 'coiffure'..." He told me that old Scouse joke, too, about the man walking along Liverpool docks who says to a docker: "Excuse me, do you know where the urinal is?" and the docker replying: "How many funnels has she got?" If I hadn't my own memories of the big ships along the Mersey with pretentious names, I wouldn't have got it.

Maybe a young Liverpudlian wouldn't get it today, now the ships are gone. And the dockers. Maybe even my son Tom wouldn't get it. He went to Liverpool University for three years, and loved the place, though he was apprehensive when he arrived, as he thought that being a southerner he would be an object of derision. Not so, he told me recently; only Mancunians drew down the hatred and derision of Liverpudlians. (The other thing he remembered clearly was that – in his words – whereas Capital Radio in London played the most horrible two-dimensional pop crap, Liverpool's tacky commercial pop station never ever played a dud song, so there must be much more natural musical taste washing around in Liverpool. )

Oh, and I forgot the most important reason of all why nobody would ever wish Liverpool not to be there. It has one of the few teams in England now capable of beating Manchester United, and nobody in their right mind could ever not want Manchester United to be beaten.

The answer to yesterday's quiz question – "Which, in 1851, was the second city in the UK after London?" – is, unexpectedly, Dublin. Which was, then, in the UK.