This mid-priced bed-in-a-box mattress went from rock-solid to soft in weeks. Here’s what impressed me – and what could be better

• The best mattresses: sleep better with our six rigorously tested picks

I fear the Panda Hybrid Bamboo is playing games with me. When I first tried this mattress last year, it was among the firmest of all contenders in my mission to discover the best mattress. It was great-looking, easy to handle, and firm. Several months later, it’s great-looking, easy to handle, and … soft?

Not quite. But Panda’s mattress is a fine example of what happens to memory foam after you’ve slept on it for a few months. The initially solid sleeping surface adapts to your body, becoming softer and cosier. My tests with weights reassured me that the mattress was still supportive and not sagging, but it definitely wasn’t as firm as in those early weeks.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

• Lap by lap updates on the action from Silverstone

• McLaren now headline act at HQ | Email John

Fat Boy Slim is on the wheels of steel. Can he be overheard over the engines? Right here, right now, it’s still raining. “I love that it’s raining,” says Lewis Hamilton. “Good old English weather. I get nervous as this is the week you get nervous the most. The fans have been ride or die with me. Thanks to them I really get to enjoy it.”

It’s raining in Northamptonshire. Good news for Max? Wet weather doesn’t usually stop him. A prep race was abandoned earlier in the day but the track dries quickly.

Not only is nuclear essential if we want to reach net zero – it’s the key to tackling poverty, too

Money can buy comfort, but energy makes comfort possible in the first place. Energy is the great enabler of the modern world. It connects the globe by moving people and hauling goods. It loosens the grip of the weather by warming our homes in winter and cooling them in summer. It forges the steel that raises our cities and synthesises the fertilisers that keep half the world’s population from starvation. It increasingly empowers us by electrifying the technologies we rely on daily.

It is also the great enabler of socioeconomic development. Monetary wealth and energy abundance move in lockstep: plot a graph of GDP per capita against energy consumption per capita, and you’ll draw a straight line. Low-energy, high-income nations do not exist. Prosperity and energy are inseparable; you cannot have one without the other.

Exclusive: PM lacks ambition and vision, says Ed Davey in damning assessment of first 12 months in power

Keir Starmer risks becoming little more than “continuity Rishi Sunak” because of his lack of vision and ambition, Ed Davey has said in a damning assessment of the prime minister’s first year in power.

The Liberal Democrats leader, whose party recorded its best result in a century at the last general election, said believed Starmer was a decent and principled man, but that it was unclear what he stood for.

Chefs have gone head over heels for the brown stuff. Some drown their burgers in it; others serve it with brioche and black pudding; one even turns it into ice-cream. What’s going on?

Pub roasts, grannies, Sunday lunch, Ah! Bisto!: gravy triggers nostalgic food memories for Britons like little else. But unlike complex French sauces, for example, gravy is brown and plain, not gastronomic alchemy. Its homely bedfellows – potatoes and pies – have had fancy makeovers, but gravy’s potential hasn’t been much exploited on the modern menu. Until now.

The nostalgic wave sweeping Britain’s food scene is reviving this ancient staple, but with a twist: gravy is going gourmet. It is appearing as a dip for burgers in London at the upmarket chain Burger & Beyond and at Nanny Bill’s. It is served with brioche and black pudding at Tom Cenci’s modern British restaurant Nessa in Soho, and even does a turn at Shaun Rankin’s Michelin-starred Grantley Hall in Yorkshire, where it is styled as beef tea and served with bread, bone marrow butter and dripping.