It was a song I didn’t think had any more life left in it.
Like anyone with children of a certain age, I was over-familiar with it to say the least. I had heard it just too, too many times. You’d get up some mornings and it would already be coming through the walls from the living room or the kitchen.
Then it would get played again on the school run.
And then there were the long car journeys. Dear God, the long car journeys, where it was played again and again, over and over, until it felt like you were going insane.
Until you were begging to listen to something else – anything else – just once.
Yes, like many parents, I was thinking I’d be quite content to never hear Let It Go again in my life.
Then along came Amelia Anisovych, the seven-year-old Ukrainian girl who went viral last week after footage circulated of her singing the song.
She is wearing a black sweater with three big, sparkly silver stars on it, the kind of thing wee girls love to wear to parties, as she sings acapella, in Ukrainian, sweetness and joy and nerves written all over her face and in every syllable coming from her mouth as the camera pans around to reveal.
The room itself is clearly a basement of some sort, with flaking white plaster walls, exposed metal pipes and glaring bulbs here and there.
And we see the people watching her sing: the parents and grandparents, teenagers, toddlers. A tiny baby in its pram.
Mothers and fathers in the background are busying themselves with blankets, laying out makeshift beds for their kids.
We are not on the school run or in front of the TV in a nice, cosy living room. It is a bomb shelter in Kyiv, under Russian attack.
In the interests of full disclosure, I feel I should say that it wasn’t until a few days after the one minute 40-second clip started circulating that I finally worked up the courage to watch it.
Because I knew, from a glance, it might very well be too much for me to bear.
And so it proved, at 50 seconds in, when Amelia brings her hands – hands that have so far been nervously clasped in front of her – up underneath her chin, in a gesture of supplication that is utterly unbearable in its context: all human life, crushed together in a cellar, while a deranged tyrant bombs their city.
At this point, like so many people, I broke down.
You may not know this but Let It Go changed the entire direction of the movie Frozen.
It was written by husband-and-wife team Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez. Elsa, who sings it in the film, had originally been conceived of as the villain of the film.
However, as they worked on the lyrics, the songwriters came to see the character more as “a scared girl struggling to control and come to terms with her gift”.
When co-directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee heard Let It Go, they said: “We knew that we had to rewrite the whole movie.” That Elsa would become a hero, both in the film and for a generation of children, especially little girls like Amelia.
A few days later Amelia got the highest possible compliment on her performance when Kristen Anderson-Lopez herself tweeted: “Dear Little Girl with the beautiful voice, my husband and I wrote this song as part of a story about healing a family in pain.
The way you sing it is like a magic trick that spreads the light in your heart and heals everyone who hears it. Keep singing! We are listening!”
When I read that, it felt, briefly, like a reminder of the good of social media, that a little girl could sing this in a war zone and almost immediately get a response from the woman who wrote the song.
And there is romance in this. But we must be realists too and the stark facts are that the UK is not listening.
That most of the 70 or 80 people crammed into that bomb shelter in Kyiv would have great difficulty getting into the UK as refugees. That our response has been the most pitiful in Europe.
That we have so far refused to match the EU’s commitment to offer Ukrainians open sanctuary.
That, while we can cry all we like at videos like the one of Amelia, our government is doing next to nothing to help her.
So, thank God for a country like Poland, a country that knows within living memory what it is like to have a murderous tyrant come sweeping through your land.
Poland has already taken in close to 1.5million Ukrainian refugees. And it was Poland that gave a happy ending to Amelia’s story, when she and her brother made it to safety there six days after her performance went around the world.
Well, almost a happy ending: her parents remain in Kyiv, their fate uncertain.
“We are listening.” Sadly, listening is no longer enough.
Don't miss the latest news from around Scotland and beyond - Sign up to our daily newsletter here .
