fwoor! look at the gables on that!

THE suzi feay COLUMN

TWO WEEKS into the New Year and how very disagreeable the world remains. Horrid things assault the eye at every turn. Have you seen the advertising hoarding showing a toilet with a brick in it with the slogan "You will"? Charming, n'est-ce-pas? I have studiously avoided registering exactly what product is being advertised. Could be All-Bran, could be the next Prime Suspect. I don't care.

Mmmm, what else? Another naff ad. This one has a picture of a busty poppet on it, and the legend: "It took him all evening to pull the cracker. It took him two hours to get the photos back." So you thought the days of "fit bird" advertising were over? Think again! What else? The sight, in a chemist's window, of a pregnancy test called "Easy-peesy". I particularly like the queasy mixture of the twee and the crude. Now we learn Club 18- 30 (of "Beaver Espana" fame) is projecting another publicity campaign. Will we never be set free?

I can't help wondering what Jane Austen would make of all this filth and frankness. (Like everyone else in the country I spent Christmas reading Sense and Sensibility.) Oh, those elegant days of the Regency when the tinkle of a teaspoon could be heard half-way round the Home Counties. It's only today, when the bathroom is a fine and private place, that we can make visual jokes about defecation. You certainly couldn't in Jane Austen's time, even though Lizzie and Jane Bennet were probably pooing into buckets and throwing the results in the garden. Clean we may be, morally fine-grained we are not.

Just in time, help comes in the unlikely form of a bulky parcel from German publisher Benedikt Taschen. A few months ago I interviewed him and was ungallant enough to say that I thought he looked 10 years older than he really was. But good old Benny doesn't bear grudges. His note informs me that "The new books are doing very good so I'm getting younger and younger again (looking now like about 22)". And if the contents of his parcel are anything to go by, I'm not at all surprised.

Thump on to the desk goes a heavy volume entitled Interiors in Morocco . If Country Homes and Interiors is the Penthouse of property porn ("Fwoor! Look at the gables on that!"), Interiors in Morocco is the literary equivalent of sex tourism. This is a book to go to bed with, to hug, to sniff, to take dancing around the room in an ecstasy of unfulfilled desire.

The editor, Lisa Lovatt-Smith, guides us round cool and fragrant gardens, tiled courtyards and calm, rectangular pools that reflect the feathery headdresses of the date-palms. We peer into formal entrance halls, rich with tapestry, dim with stained glass. We ogle vast, kilim-covered sofas, cushions of red and gold, gleaming vases. We long to step into the corner for tea set up on the roof under an impromptu canopy. Edward Said would no doubt disapprove, but my imagination's already on the Orient Express, departing from Lord Leighton's Moorish Hall and stopping at all stations via The Thief of Baghdad to The 1,001 Nights. Rimbaud's the driver, Jane Bowles checks the tickets and Isabelle Eberhardt is the trolley-dolly.

All the top types keep a bijou residence in Morocco, you know. Just salivate over Jean-Louis Scherrer's shady, white and green courtyard and Yves Saint- Laurent's sumptuous black marble bathroom. But even the humble habitations are fantastically appealing: one of the most moving and attractive little dwellings is a troglodyte house carved from rock. The white-washed bedroom with its pile of stripy bedding, a shelf for personal effects, and a niche for the radio, is minimalist perfection.

Yes, yes, I think wildly, it would be perfectly possible to lead a simple life there (without alcohol? Oh, come on!), shroud myself from head to foot and throw out my personal possessions. I think of the little Iranian girl in The White Balloon who spends the New Year searching for the perfect goldfish, rather than getting pissed on alcoholic lemonade like our own jaded tinies. Fired by her charming simplicity, I fill a large cardboard box with thumbed books, shoes, old clothes and tiresome CDs and whizz them down to the charity shop. But when I get back I realise that my flat is still a long way short of Islamic perfection. Somehow my bathroom lacks the Alma-Tadema charm of the book's cover, which displays a blue bath in a grimy niche, water trickling from a central spout, and, at the edge of the bath, a huge glass lantern, a vivid purple packet of white candles and a box of matches, casually slung by an invisible hand.

Although small photos feature the owners, a cosmopolitan mix of French, Americans, locals, artists and aristocrats, these serene gardens and shady terraces are cunningly depopulated: your mind can walk straight in and take possession. On the night of the pounds 40m lottery draw, we went to the Deptford pantomime, which was, appropriately enough, Aladdin. Not a lot remained of the authentic Arabic yarn, though the baddie declaimed "New lamps for old!" in a most satisfactory fashion. Instead the troupe delivered a passionate warning against the evil of untold riches as the callous Djinn of the lamp corrupted Dame Twanky with his wiles. Oh for a Djinn to whisk me off to the medina in Marrakesh, for a life of smoking kif, spooning tender morsels from the fragrant tagine and sipping mint tea on the roof terrace. The plumbing's quite good too. No pooing into buckets for YSL.