KEY POINTS:
You do not need to have been within a 20,000km radius of Liverpool for images of that city to impinge on your consciousness.
It is the Mersey, the docks, football, crop-topped scallies and vast swathes of urban wasteland. It is the Beatles: Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, Eleanor Rigby, Matthew St and the Cavern Club, the sweating, heaving, fetid Cavern.
So when you finally visit the place of these images you half expect your story to start with, "Throw away all your preconceptions ... "
But Liverpool is something of a paradox: the surprise is that there is little surprising at all. You really do feel like you've seen it all before.
Walk through the city's shopping precinct and you're an island in a river of tracksuit-bedecked scallies with crop haircuts and miniskirt-wearing lasses. There are countless references to the Fab Four, and the salt-tainted air indicates that Liverpool's famous docks, and therefore the Mersey, are within spitting distance.
So entrenched is Liverpool in popular culture that it has a warm embrace - certainly warmer than its Lancashire rival, Manchester, just a few kilometres down the M62 - and a familiar feel. Perhaps the only truly mind-boggling thing about the city is the price of the Beatles kitsch.
No, that's not fair, Liverpool has 2500 listed buildings, of which 26 are Grade I, more than any outside London. They're an astonishingly eclectic collection too, sprinkled around areas that would feature high on the urban deprivation scale.
In the 1800s, 40 per cent of the world's trade passed through the Docklands so it's as good a place as any to start.
At Pier Head you'll walk past the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building, all opulent structures that point to more prosperous times.
At Albert Dock you can while away a day without noticing the time. Restored in the 1980s, Albert Dock is all cast iron and stone and is the largest collection of Grade I listed buildings in Britain.
As well as housing the Merseyside Maritime Museum, the International Slavery Museum and the Tate Liverpool, it is also home to several bars.
At Stanley Dock you'll find the Tobacco Warehouse, which at the time it was built in 1901, was the world's largest building in area and is still the world's largest brick-work building.
Because Liverpool was the hub of the slave trade and the focal point of British immigration during the 18th and 19th centuries, it has a broad range of places of worship, including synagogues and Greek Orthodox churches.
However, the two standouts are the twin cathedrals connected by a street named Hope.
The Catholic cathedral is known affectionately as Paddy's Wigwam because of its distinctive look and the large Irish community in Liverpool (the lilting Scouse accent is influenced by the massive wave of Irish immigration).
It has the largest panel of stained glass in the world.
The more classical Anglican cathedral has one of the longest naves, largest organs and heaviest and highest peals of bells in the world.
If Liverpool sounds a bit storybook, don't be fooled. When its maritime and manufacturing industries went into decline, a badly bomb-scarred Liverpool looked incapable of recovery.
After all, the Beatles didn't stick around once they found fame and fortune.
There is still urban deprivation on a grand scale. Four of the 10 poorest postcodes in England are in Liverpool, and Steve, my taxi driver, seems almost apologetic about the state of the neighbourhood surrounding Anfield, home to Liverpool Football Club.
"This used to be a good area," he intoned. I doubted it.
Steve is a Scouser who wears that tag as a badge of pride rather than treat it as a derogatory term.
Scouse is a type of stew and is spat out, the word not the stew, with particular venom by Mancunians who believe Liverpudlians are brigands and thieves.
For example, a popular song in the stands of Old Trafford, Manchester United's home ground, goes like this (sung to the tune of Lord of the Dance):
"Park [Korean footballer Park Ji-Sung], Park, whoever you may be, you eat dog in your own country,it could be worse, you could be Scouse, eating rats in your council house."
Not surprisingly, they don't sing those songs at Goodison Park and Anfield, the dog-eared homes of Everton and Liverpool.
Despite being such bitter rivals, their homes are but a couple of
hefty kicks from each other. Everton is the older club but Goodison, built in 1892, has a slightly newer stadium. Anfield housed Everton until a rent dispute saw them leave and the ground's owners formed Liverpool. Everton is still considered, by the blue half at least, to be the true club of the city.
Anfield's most famous landmark is the You'll Never Walk Alone Gates, a poignant shrine to the 96 Liverpool fans who died at Hillsborough in 1989. That tragedy has come to define Liverpool's "us against them" relationship with the rest of England.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, several rumours about the behaviour of Liverpool supporters were propagated in the press, particularly in the mass-circulation Sun, and they have never been forgiven by Merseysiders.
From there, the cabbie takes us into the city. He drops us off by Eleanor Rigby, cast in bronze, sitting on a bench in Stanley St. It's not why he's dropped my colleague and I off here though. We're thirsty. Jamie Carragher, a central defender for Liverpool and bit of a local hero, owns the bar across the street.
Football meets the Beatles - an opposite drop-off point if ever there was one.
Dylan Cleaver travelled to Liverpool courtesy of Flight Centre.