You may call me a nimby. There. I hope you enjoyed doing so and feel better now. But how would you feel if you woke up one day to find a 20ft-tall golden effigy of a naked Vladimir Putin in your garden?

I never used to have a back yard. But now, at 46, I finally do. And suddenly there are things I don’t want in it. And if objecting to a 20ft-tall golden effigy of a naked Vladimir Putin in my back yard is nimbyism, then poison my tea with invisible radioactive chemicals, discredit me in a Russian TV drama, secretly back an attempt to destabilise Ukraine, fund far-right isolationist parties all across Europe and write “NIMBY” on my forehead in Cyrillic script right now. For I am Nimby! Hear me roar!

By the time I had tried to navigate the council’s website to complain about the pointedly undressed polar bear-wrangler, the garish representation of the one-time KGB operative and hang-gliding daredevil had disappeared into the sky. Perhaps I had imagined it. A naked golden effigy of Vladimir Putin in my garden? Absurd! Far more likely the sun glancing off an upturned bucket, or a fallen stick that somehow seemed to assume the shape of the martial arts-obsessed macho man. I knew I shouldn’t have had that third bucket of salvia.

Apparently airborne via jet boosters concealed in its riding boots (the only item of clothing the golden Putin robot wears), it had soon alighted in another garden eight doors down, where it intimidated a family of broadminded north London Unitarians with its unapologetic masculinity. And the naked Putin continued with this bewildering behaviour all week, zooming around the blue winter sky at erratic intervals, the watery sun shining off its golden gluteus, as it took up a succession of provocative positions in public and private spaces, and then disappeared again, sometimes escorted by three children’s kites bearing the logo of our local authority.

Of course some residents are delighted. House prices in the formerly forbidding London borough where I have resided since the 90s have risen 800% in the past three decades. The street’s elderly working-class survivors, hoping to see out their days in familiar settings, dread being driven into the mansion tax bracket. They hope that the looming presence of a giant former communist kung-fu nudist will depress property prices, and spare them an annual penalty. To them, as he was to many of the Russian people, the topless tiger tranquilliser has messianic qualities. As does Myleene Klass.

Avaricious developers with interests in local housing stock, however, are delighted by the vast bare-bottomed Soviet statesman. Future purchases in the area are likely to be made with filthy Russian money anyway, and it is thought that the presence of the enormous international Fats Domino interpreter and human-rights champion may encourage expat oligarch cash to flow into their wealth troughs.

But to me, a British back-yard owner late in life, this huge Vladimir Putin, rising up naked in the stirrups so that his golden testicles swing low over the shire horse’s saddle, blocking out the sun, is nothing but a post-Glasnost eyesore.

Despite being a committed champagne socialist, I now wish the Russian revolution had never taken place. I am sure a giant statue of a modern-day Romanov royal would not have been quite so vulgar, and would have at least kept their pants on, if only for fear of nicking their bottom on a thorn, and bleeding to death.

The timing of the huge Putin’s incursions are perfect. The page on the local government website where you are supposed to report the sudden arrival of any oversized statues of naked international politicians seems to have some kind of glitch, making it impossible to log the Putin; paperwork that should have been sent out to neighbours appears to have been misplaced. We fear the establishment of a precedent, and then it will be impossible to stop the land being monopolised for the disporting of a succession of disrobed contemporary statespersons.

Suddenly those neighbours who chose to tolerate the bare-assed Putin may find themselves confronted with an office-block-sized effigy of Hungary’s Janos Ader in an elastic thong, a Wicker Man-style representation of Swaziland’s Mswati III in a purple peephole pantie, or a BT Tower-proportioned waxwork of Iceland’s Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, entirely naked, and bending over in a natural hot spring to pick up a puffin egg. No one wants to see that. Not even Olafur’s dog, Sámur, who is named after the dog of Gunnar of Hlíðarendi, one of the main characters in the Icelandic Njáls saga.

“Today, the presumption is in favour of planning permission,” I am advised, and knocking the trouserless Putin’s legs by moonlight with a hammer, I realise they are quite hollow, providing a space that technically qualifies as a development opportunity for affordable housing, sugaring the property magnate’s pill.

On Wednesday morning our cat, Chibnall (my wife remains a huge Broadchurch fan, despite the tide of popular opinion turning against her, while I prefer the Sharknado series of films), brought in a headless dove. I don’t think that little Chibnall had bitten the head off the bird herself, as its gaping neck was covered with burn marks. Viewing the super-sized Putin from the garden I saw that the statue’s pendulous buttocks seemed stained with scorches.

Had Putin’s covertly weaponised ass cheeks deliberately decapitated the dove, the worldwide symbol of peace, in a sick, pantomine-style satire of international opinion? If so, this was exactly the kind of counterintuitive conceptual-art-style gesture Putin’s adviser Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov would surely have originated. Deep within the Kremlin, Surkov submits to the executive a pencil drawing of a missile shooting out from the backside of a 200ft Putin. He is rewarded with offers of prostitutes, aftershave and new trousers, and told to take the rest of the week off.

The Quaker family who rent space in my cellar keep doves, so I went down to report the avian death. I was greeted by the familiar smell of boiling porridge, and on shaking hands with Old Man Urizel my palm was smeared with melted chocolate, as usual. Urizel expects nothing from the proper procedures. “History repeats itself,” he declares from beneath a broad-brimmed black hat, through a mouthful of hot oats, steeling himself to sit through another cycle.