The people who brought us `The Face' and `Arena' in the Eighties have a new project: a ground-breaking magazine for women. It's going to be different, they say. But how exactly?

Monday: The announcement in a national newspaper that I'd been eating Slim Fast seems to have shocked more people than anything else I've done at loaded over the last three years, including my resignation. For an hour last Friday I explained my departure from one men's mag to another as a symptom of "growing up" but by late Sunday this was old news. I celebrate my appointment to the editorship of GQ by driving to a benefit for Striking Liverpool Dockers at the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden with two Scouse rascals, Kevin and Glen. We were going to watch the band Hunkpapa featuring the vocal talents of one Peter Hooton, late of The Farm, but arrive to discover Noel Gallagher will also be appearing. Which is nice. Noel's appearance has been kept so secret to avoid a stampede that at 7pm the organisers ring Radio 1 to get more punters. All the way up to the Fiddler I knocked back Glen and Kev's misguided assertions that I am the new King of European Cool by spitting out my editorial intentions through mouthfuls of popcorn. A classy operator, for sure. Glen wiped his boots on the weekend's newspapers and Kev spilt chips everywhere. If this is the way they do things at Italian Vogue then I'll eat my own spit. In true style we end the evening serenading the very patient bar manager at the Hyde Park Stakis Hotel.

Slicing sounds; an ominous crunch; the splat of inert flesh against stainless steel. Here is the first TV commercial (I think) to exploit the UK's favourite fast-growing themed leisure experience; first row front at the pathology lab. It's for GQ Active, a spin-off from GQ, the magazine for the literate natty dresser.

James Brown, the father of Laddism and the editor of the phenomenally successful men's magazine Loaded, has turned his attention to the more staid men's monthly GQ.

The continuing rise in the sales of men's magazines in the last two years has been based largely on the enlargement of one particular part of a man's anatomy. GQ Active, the new sports and health magazine, launched this month with the intention of helping them enlarge other areas, although it, too, put a girl in an unzipped wet suit on the front cover in tacit acknowledgement that sex always sells. The cover picture was originally to have been a male cyclist, but was changed at the last minute.

pounds 500,000 for a 4,000-word story? Tired movie producers used to turn to novelists when they ran out of ideas. Now they read magazines - and find feature writers more than happy to help.

Shock-absorbers and tissue-paper can keep travellers crease free, advises John Morgan

Chris Blackhurst on tributes to Terence Donovan, who died on Friday

No snow? No mountains? Never mind. If you want to be a snowboarder it's attitude, not altitude, that counts, says Matthew Sweet

Robert Hewson, 24, PA

The bimonthly Arena had no rivals in 1986. Ten years on it had to raise the tempo, says the magazine's group editor Dylan Jones

I'm thinking of going up to the Bell Hotel in Driffield next week to attend the Bishop of Hull's all-male evening. Traditionalists should not worry, this is not an exercise in converting chaps to gay Anglicanism; the Right Reverend James Jones simply wants to talk to us about the crisis of masculinity. The vicar of Driffield has said of the bishop that he "thinks men should be men, so he wants to inspire them".

The washing powder market braced itself yesterday for a return of the soap wars as it emerged that Unilever is to put millions of pounds into relaunching Persil. The product will essentially remain the same but be marketed in a new "caring" way.

When the narcissistic Nineties man starts to lose his hair he is an easy target for wonder cures.