Name: Life drawing.

Age: Ancient.

Appearance: Upsettingly dangly.

Just remind me, what is life drawing again? It’s where a group of people sit in a room and draw the naked person standing in front of them.

I didn’t think that happened outside of Carry On movies. No, it’s still going on. There’s a regular class every Friday afternoon at Hampstead Community Centre in north London. Or at least there used to be.

That sounds ominous. Sadly, its days are numbered. You see, there have been complaints.

Complaints about nudity? This sounds like cancel culture gone mad. And that’s certainly how they’ve been received. The man who runs the class has reacted to the complaints by calling them “a Taliban attitude to artistic creation”, while one of the models has called them “a puritanical response”.

This is a disgrace. I know! How are budding artists supposed to be able to draw human genitals if they can’t sit staring at them in a community hall for hours on end?

I suppose they could always copy them off the internet. But what about the greats? With woke diktats like this, Michelangelo’s David would have had to wear shorts.

Maybe this was just a one-off incident, though. It wasn’t! Life drawing as we know it is on the ropes! In September, a gallery in Hay-on-Wye was asked by police to remove a nude painting from its window, and naked life drawing models at the Royal Academy of Arts have been complaining that artists are secretly taking pictures of them on their phones for “homework”.

So what do we do? Fight back? Yes, we must fight back against pointless safeguarding!

Wait, what do you mean by safeguarding? Oh, the complaints in Hampstead were due to the class being sandwiched between two sessions that children attend.

So there was a chance that kids might have accidentally walked in on it? Yes, and now the group has had to move.

Pardon? The life drawing group. It had to relocate to a nearby centre to continue the classes.

So the classes are still happening, and everyone who wants to draw a naked person can still draw a naked person? Yes, that’s right.

But you made it sound as if nudity was being banned. It was being banned! In one place at one time, in a manner that had a convenient solution for everyone involved. That still counts!

I’m not sure it does. Listen, which would you rather read, a story about some artists moving to a different building a third of a mile away or one about woke warriors banning penises?

Do say: “Drawing naked models is cancelled.”

Don’t say: “Here, sketch two satsumas and a banana instead.”