Hi Phil,
If you turn on SQL debugging (set DBIX_CLASS_STORAGE_DBI_DEBUG to true in your environment), you'll notice that the status object gets fetched when you first try to access ->descr, and isn't refetched when you just change a column entry in the check object. It would indeed be nice if that magically updated a related object, and I'll propose it.

In the meantime you can do either:

  my $newstatus = $schema->resultset('Status')->find(2);
  $check->status($newstatus);
[download]

or:

  $check->update({status => 2});
  $check->discard_changes();
[download]

It's not as pretty.. but it works.

C.