Kindness, compassion, tolerance and forgiveness are the cornerstones of unconditional love.

Those four don't arrive together. Plenty of people are kind and cannot forgive; plenty forgive easily and are careless day to day.

The one that gets least attention is tolerance, because it's the least moving. It's the ordinary business of living alongside somebody whose habits irritate you — the way they load the dishwasher, the story you have heard nine times — for another thirty years, without letting any of it become a case against them.

Love without conditions sounds enormous. In practice it is mostly this: staying, on an unremarkable Tuesday, when nothing about the situation is inspiring.

Somebody spooning food into a parent who no longer recognises them is doing all four at once, and would not describe it as any of them.