Instead he blatantly ignores the dietary requirements of this High Steaks column, orders a beetroot salad and, while sipping a glass of Rameau d’Or Petit Amour Rose and watching me chew on a bavette steak with Café de Paris butter, starts joking about death.

That subject, as he approaches his 75th birthday, is perhaps not quite as funny as it was back in London in the 1970s when Turner was in his “wild colonial boy” days, hanging out in pubs which looked like this one, scoffing shepherd’s pie, draining pints of lager, chasing girls, hopping on a bus to Kathmandu and giving no real thought for the morrow.

But he still finds it pretty funny, especially given he’s well aware that his senior colleagues frequently gather to discuss how Flight Centre is going to operate once the old man shuffles off.

“The board has got a project on this matter which I am not involved in,’’ he says dryly.

“It’s called Weekend at Bernies.’’

It’s fortunate he has a sense of humour. Four years ago, he desperately needed it.

The tycoon who grew up on a Stanthorpe orchard, roamed across the globe, built a travel empire and joined the ranks of the international super rich watched on as it all tottered at the edge of the abyss.

It is undoubtedly true that the pandemic cost thousands of Queensland business operators a great deal financially. But it cost Turner $3.2 billion.

“We had costs of $230 million a month and income, generally, of around $250 million a month, and our income, almost overnight, stopped,’’ he says.

He still recalls a March 2020 conversation with his London-based executive who runs the Northern Hemisphere just as the Australian borders began to shut down.

They still had a little over $1 billion in the bank but Turner and senior colleagues knew how serious the situation was. They set up a war room, with some sleeping in the office as they began chasing capital to keep afloat.

Turner knew he was OK at a personal level.

“I have been in business 50 years – you probably come across most things,’’ he says.

“The reality was, financially, our family was OK, but a lot of our employees had mortgages and commitments and we had to reduce our headcount from 21,000 to about 6500 almost overnight.

“That was the hard part.’’

Turner is not bitter about how governments handled Covid, and Flight Centre is back on track even if the total hit it took in terms of lost profit tallies up to around $3.2 billion.

But Turner does hope that we, as a nation, now understand that the approach taken was just plain wrong.

“If you listen to most of the experts, the government did have a pandemic plan and they just threw it out the window and followed what the Chinese did in Wuhan – lock down.’’

That might have been fine for a Communist country, but not for a democracy like Australia, he says.

A veterinary surgeon by trade, Turner used an already solid knowledge base on viruses to investigate Covid and the measures taken to fight it, including the efficacy of masks.

He can now enjoy the somewhat hollow satisfaction of “I told you so’’.

“I’ve pulled out a few interviews I did with the ABC during Covid,’’ he says.

“I reckon most of those things I spoke about I was dead right on, but no one took any notice of it.’’

Those enclosures, restrictions, restraints – that entire, government-led circumscription of our world during Covid – appears to offend something residing deep in Turner’s DNA; something that began stirring when he was working as a vet in the United Kingdom when he was still in his mid 20s.

There are pivotal moments which arise in every life, only made apparent by hindsight.

For Turner it was a few seconds in 1972 when he was working at Selby North Yorkshire and found himself at an old airfield filled with discarded double-decker Bristol buses.

He was gazing at one, coloured green and fitted out for camping. That, while not unusual, was still somewhat novel given it was only around six years earlier that the first Winnebago had rolled off the assembly lines in Iowa.

Turner suddenly decided in that split second he would buy it, and did so for around 600 (British) quid.

He convinced his mate Geoff “Spy’’ Lomas to get in on the deal over a few steins at the Munich Beer Festival and off they went with paying passengers on a trip around Spain, Portugal and Morocco.

After that, this “thing’’ which he had stumbled upon, this idea of rattling around Europe in a double decker bus and getting liquored up on balmy evenings on the Costa del Sol, began mutating at an astonishing rate.

“You must have realised you could make money?” I say.

“No, no, no, not at all – in the first year or two it was purely for fun, not for money,’’ he says

But they did make money. By the end of the 1970s they had about 70 buses over Europe and into North Africa with about one dozen going to Kathmandu

The company was eventually called Top Deck and it was staffed by people like Turner – young blokes who were not seeking public service careers and not overly enamoured with bureaucracies, licensing requirements, codes of conduct, regulatory commissions, or, to use a long-discarded word, “beadledom.’’

If you were in a British-based vehicle, you could pretty much go anywhere with Customs officials just stamping you in and out.

These blokes liked freedom, they liked the girls who would come on these trips, they liked to drink beer and they relished having to improvise when circumstances changed on the road.

They adapted to the terrain, fixing their own buses when they broke down or using the skills of backyard mechanics in dusty Middle Eastern towns, and they rarely needed to call the London mothership for help.

“Mick (one of his mates) did do in an engine between Kandahar and Kabul,’’ Turner recalls, almost wistfully.

“I remember getting the call in London at 3 in the morning and flying an engine out to him.’’

Self-reliance might have been a Top Deck motto.

“If you weren’t capable of doing that you would not survive, you were out,’’ he says.

“I think some of that culture is still very much part of Flight Centre.’’

While it may exist inside his company, many would agree it’s no longer a trait encouraged or even tolerated in the wider world, and Turner accepts times have changed with regulatory regimes the rule.

“You could never do what we did in the 1970s today – not in England, not across Europe, not really anywhere,’’ he says.

Which is not to say travel is not booming in the 21st Century.

When the shackles of Covid were removed, Aussies with cabin-fever swarmed onto flights, but the world had changed in those years.

Bringing down airfare prices to pre-Covid levels is not going to be easy, and the collapse last week of Bonza only highlighted that reality.

The budget airline only had a small presence in Australian aviation, but its loss is indicative of the stranglehold Qantas and Virgin have on the domestic flight market.

Turner says some wealthy operator with a strong line of credit might one day break in, but he can’t see one on the immediate horizon.

Internationally, he believes more Chinese carriers could soon be flying the routes favoured by Australians.

Turner says they are “pretty good’’ services with the capacity to reduce international fares, though the return of the $800 return flight to London may be a way off.

As for his own immediate future, well, he doesn’t want to rate his beetroot salad for one thing, so I confer an 8 out of 10 on the Bavette Steak and a 10 out of 10 on the service for both of us.

Beyond that he does not plan on dying soon, even if his board are making preparations for the event.

Turner sees his two kids as his legacy, both self-reliant business people who are making their own way in the world.

But, in the interim, he still wants to do what he has always done and that is have fun, something he places a far higher value on than in making money.

Not “fun’’ as in the pursuit of trivial and transitory pleasure, but “fun’’ as in the pursuit of happiness – something the Americans once valued so highly they wrote it into their constitution.

“Business is not life and death – it’s not like fighting a war in the Middle East,’’ Turner says.

“Business can be serious, but you don’t want to take business too seriously.’’

STEAK: Bavette steak with Cafe de Paris butter

LOCATION: The Rose & Crown, South Bank

MICHAEL’S RATING: 8/10