Yoko Ono is back in Liverpool, a city she never forgot

“Your life is being conducted in front of the world, like a play,” Yoko Ono tweeted recently. “Know that it is, therefore, a play to people who watch it.” That Ono is on Twitter makes utter sense: her aphorisms were almost like tweets before the thing was invented. She has always been ahead of her time. People seem to have hated her in so many ways that I assume she must see herself as a character in a story in order just to live, just to continue being her own woman.

She is here now in front of me, a tiny woman in her shades and her hat tending to the final details of her exhibition in Liverpool, . I see apples on Perspex plinths, to replicate the apple that an apparently rude John Lennon took a bite of when he met her at the Indica gallery in London. Ono, who for so long was ageless, is now 85 and needs a bit of help. I am told she is feeling emotional. She doesn’t and sit in his bedroom, feeling him close.