KEY POINTS:
Sir Richard Branson is having a "select" group of people to a lunch and would I like to go? What I want is an interview but that's not on offer so, yes please, and what a nice way of putting it.
I'll get to have a gawk, at
the very least. I'm not in the "select" group, obviously, who are Sam Neill, Karen Walker, Eric Watson and the chief executive of Tourism New Zealand, George Hickton.
There are loads of PR people, three journos and our photographer. I can't imagine that the names are over the moon about having lunch at a table with journos.
But as Branson knows better than just about anyone, there's no point doing anything if there's not going to be some publicity in it.
He arrives, boringly, in a car with five (five!) PR chickies, leaps out and begins performing. This means giving the thumbs-up and flashing that famous blinding Branson grin. This is all very practised but is, when you think about it, quite loony.
He's 57 and still carrying on like a young thing who is all about having fun but is really a successful businessman worth around (nobody really knows) £3 billion ($8.53 billion). He is a Peter Pan-like figure who never seems to get any older - or at least, act any older - and he'll probably still be carrying on like this when he's 110.
He could live that long; he has the genes. He is planning to go into space with Virgin Galactic and tells me his parents, in their 90s, will go too. He says his grandparents all lived to be over a hundred so, in Branson terms, he is still a young thing.
I am not allowed to call space "the final stunt". "Don't call it a stunt. It's an adventure. It is a big frontier to cross and I think it could be quite useful to the world one day if we can have reusable spaceships that can go into space that, aah, because, you know, it's going to enable people to go into space, you know, in an affordable way. One day, hopefully, we can start repopulating some of the other planets."
He thinks eventually we'll be able to "fly to London in half an hour - and in an environmentally friendly way. What we're working on is being able to put people into space and then drop them down into London."
If anyone else was telling you this at lunch you'd think they'd had too much to drink (he had one glass) or they were a nutter. But this is Sir Richard Branson. I manage to stammer: "In your lifetime?" He doesn't rule it out.
He has popped over to have a chat and because he is mostly nice and obliging to journalists - although, as I will find out, he has his limits - he doesn't mind at all if I ask him some questions. This is a relief and not just for the obvious reason that I'm going to get my interview.
It hasn't been a relaxing lunch. I'm on the other side of the table from Branson, which ought to be a good spot from which to gawk and think: What a funny life he has, having lunch with strangers, turning on the charm, having fun, fun, fun in public.
I'll ask him later whether there's much difference between the public and the private him. He says: "I don't necessarily think so. I mean, I enjoy life. When I'm promoting our brand I'm having fun doing it and, when I'm not promoting our brand, I'm having fun."
I've asked this because I hope that in private - when he's having people over for lunch at home - he doesn't wink at his guests across the table and give them the thumbs-up. This is what he did on the two occasions I dared look at him. It was disconcerting. I mean, what are you supposed to do in response? I have a dreadful feeling I gave him the thumbs-up back. I'm sure I didn't attempt the wink, but who knows? I certainly didn't dare look again for fear we'd have to go on winking and giving the thumbs-up for hours.
He's used to journalists but I think he prefers them at the distance of the other side of the table. The contrast between the winking, thumbs-up bloke and the one who sits next to me, not making eye contact and ripping tiny pieces off the paper tablecloth, is remarkable. So I think, despite his assertion to the contrary, that the full-on, fun public persona is one he puts on and takes off. He's up front about the manufactured nature of his stunts. "We will try to give the photographers a fun picture which will get on front pages rather than a boring picture which will get on the back pages. But I think it [the photo of him punting on the River Avon in Christchurch] just made people smile. I mean, everybody had a laugh."
I wonder, though, whether it still makes him laugh or whether it's become a bit 'by numbers'. "No, I just think every day, every second, I try to throw myself into whatever I'm doing and enjoy what I'm doing and make sure all the people around me have a good time and live life to its full and, I mean, I was told that I was going to have to bungy jump when I got to New Zealand and I've done a lot of that sort of thing and I thought ... punting!"
So perhaps he's not ageless after all. Punting is more appropriate for his age. "Yeah, exactly." But he still does crazy stuff. He says he decided at the last minute to come to New Zealand and he was in Australia anyway. "I suppose it was a realisation that it was the third anniversary [of his low-cost carrier Pacific Blue flying the Tasman route]. I hadn't actually been here since the launch three years ago and all the feedback about Pacific Blue had been fantastic and I just thought it'd be good to pop over and say 'thank you' and, um, any excuse for a party."
He doesn't really do partying, of course; everything's business with him. The punting and chucking of female staff into the Avon is business in the guise of that famous spontaneity. "Well, normally if you're in a punt, punts are dicey. I've been in punts before and they go over. So I expected, because my punting's not good, that we were going to go over anyway, so I did pre-warn the girls that they might get wet. So they made sure they didn't have their best underwear on."
Despite his insistence that everyone has fun, all the time, he is actually earnest and likes to be taken seriously. What he really likes to talk about is global warming and he can talk about it for ages.
Asking how he squares his concerns with being in the airline business was just encouraging him, so I now know a lot about CO2 emissions and what the industry should be doing and so on. It's all very worthy but, honestly, zzzzzzzzzz.
Despite this wanting to be taken seriously and obvious success - the Observer once described him as "basically a suit disguised as a sweater" - he still cultivates the Virgin brand as the little battler. "We love to challenge big companies in big sectors where they're taking the consumer for a ride."
Talking of rides, I say, to get him off global warming, "a mate of mine went to Sydney on one of your planes and it took eight hours. It went via Brisbane."
He says, without missing a beat, "he shouldn't have flown to Sydney on that plane then". And uses this as a segue into Virgin Blue's expansion plan and, oh, here we are back at global warming and the Arctic melting. I say: "It's because of your planes taking eight hours to get to Sydney." "Our planes actually fly directly." They don't. I phoned and checked.
He put up with me saying I'd read he's like the Queen and never carries money and is notoriously stingy. Would he like us to have a whip-around to pay for lunch? "No. No. Yeah. That would be great."
He never carries money because "ha, ha, well, the trouble is I might end up in the water, so it's wise not to". Also, "I must admit, the embarrassing thing - and the pleasant thing, I suppose - about making some money is that nobody ever wants you to spend it. They'll always say, 'No, no, we'll pay for that' or hotels you go to, 'No, no, no, just come to our hotel'. So there's no need to carry money. It's a very unfair world."
So he took the accusation of being stingy well. But just as I was thinking, well, he's all right but a bit earnest for a self-proclaimed funster, he's on his feet, hissing: "You! You!" Then he's clapping his hand, quite hard I might say, over my mouth. "She's paying," he announces to the table.
Well, really. What did I do? One of the PR chicks had asked how long it would take to get to his next appointment at the Hyatt? "Eight minutes," somebody says and I mutter "but not on Virgin because you've got to go to Brisbane first".
That may have been what did it. I'd have applauded, actually, but it's quite difficult to do when you've got a billionaire's hand over your mouth. But, a belated bravo. He can be spontaneous after all.
