Don't count on Apple's new Recovery Mode feature, as that's only designed for niche cases where an Apple Watch experiences a problem, not as a way to revert to a previous version of watchOS. If something doesn't work the way you'd expect, you'll be stuck with that problem until the next beta arrives, hopefully with a fix. Unless you're really eager and willing to sacrifice an Apple Watch to the vagaries of early betas, you're better off waiting for the public beta - especially since with watchOS, there's no going back to a previous version. The Dig Street Festival is an unusual and riotous book that also succeeds in truly reflecting the world around us.A compatible Apple Watch running watchOS 9.5 or later Yet from all this, Chris Walsh constructs a world of touching honesty and some real laugh-out-loud moments. He is a vulnerable character buffeted by waves of gentrification and at the mercy of a boss and a landlord who see him only as a dependent. Our hero, John, is a deeply-thinking, deeply-feeling man, always ready to approach the world with an open mind, and heartbreakingly in love with the local barmaid, Lois. Events and people collide into each other – sometimes not just figuratively – with a sort of frenzied fun that pulls the plot in unexpected directions but the absurdity of both the situations and characters is underpinned by a story which, at heart, is about how much we all have to offer each other. At various points John and his friends find themselves accidentally robbing a bank, attending a pen-training seminar in order to fill out a council form, and re-exploring the south pole at “Leytonstow’s premier ice skating venue”. The novel has a sweetly funny tone arising both from its main characters’ warm naivety and the absolute chaos of the plot. The borough itself has a starring role in the story and readers can enjoy picking out the cameos from “Whitehorse Road”, “Leytonstow Village” and of course “Dig Street” itself (I may be a little slow, but it did take me a while to connect this to Hoe Street).

Both marginal and marginalised, Gabby, John and Glyn are all residents of the rapidly deteriorating Clements Markham House, the kind of much-divided, over-crowded crumbling villa that will be familiar to any resident of Waltham Forest. The trio of characters at the centre of Chris Walsh’s debut The Dig Street Festival are among the unlikeliest I have ever met in a novel. Sarah Fairbairn reviews a novel set in the familiar-sounding neighbourhood of Leytonstow

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