5 days in the life of JAMES BROWN

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.

TUESDAY: The true spirit of loaded has reappeared in the Animal House. During the early days we weren't sure how far our luck would run so we pushed it all the way. Now that Deeson, Bummage and I know we have only a matter of weeks left in this wonderful magazine, the same manic behaviour is coursing through the office. Acid Brass, a CD featuring a brass band playing acid house anthems, blasts out of the office stereo and the heady stench of skunk billows down the stairs into Marie Claire. (Should be a good issue in August.) Designers Miles and Jim reminisce about sunrises spent shivering in fields at the start of the decade and I know that this will be how we'll spend our final years. Listening to a bloody brass band playing "808 State".

Head off to the Raymond Duck Dining Club to listen to my best mate Shakey bemoan his lack of a decent relationship: "All my mates in Malvern are either married or have kids. Even Hodge has a great-looking bird now and he hasn't had a shag since the last Labour government. And you're joining an old-man's magazine. What's going on? All I can do is throw whatever I've got at a couple of drunken slappers and hope for the best. Thirty seconds and then splosh. That's it." The man's a poet.

WEDNESDAY: Watch Kenny Everett documentary and wonder if the reason we and the rest of the media didn't champion him sooner after his death was because he died of Aids or because everyone had simply forgotten the impact he had had. When I was at school the man was a phenomenon but back then Sid Snot addressing the television audience as Friends of Dorothy meant nothing to a playground of 14-year-olds.

THURSDAY: Meet GQ staff for first time. Lunch with newspaper mogul. Electricity cut off at flat.

FRIDAY: Wash in hot water from pan. Travel the mile from the loaded office to the BBC studios at Bush House in Jason's fibreglass bomb of a Lotus Esprit. Appear on 5 Live's news discussion programme The Treatment. The show also features the true voice of sport, Derek "Robo" Robinson, which is exciting. Robo is a visionary from Middlesbrough whom I kneel before in admiration.

Discussion centres on the news that vegetables can now taste like chocolate, phone boxes in the future will be in the form of piss icicles and that Leeds University has miraculously discovered that people in Romford drive Ford Escorts.

The recording is interrupted by the arrival of Martin Deeson, my fellow deserter from loaded, who clearly wonders what is going on. Although Deeson has taken the day off work to "sort the wedding out" it's apparent from the way he stares at Stuart's wine bottle that he has spent the best part of the last 24 hours awake, shaking and sweating in toilets with his excellent wife-to-be Collinson Jones. The terrible love duo drag me into the night and then dump me on Oxford Street eight hours later. The week ends like it always did before my Slim Fast binge kicked in. Wretching in a doorway on a wet London pavement while women in stilettos scream for taxis.

James Brown has been appointed next editor of 'GQ'.