home.php and recent posts

Hi. I’ve looked quite extensively for an answer to this but have had no luck.

I’m working on a non-blog (ie, page based) site that uses wordpress as a cms, and displays the blog page as a “News and Updates” section. The site has to have a custom splash page. I’ve achieved this by using the home.php file in my theme, which works fine. But as far as I can tell, the only way of enabling this page is to NOT use the “static page” setting in settings/reading in the control panel.

My problem is that now I can’t figure out how to display my “posts page”, which I had previously set to a “news and updates” page in settings/reading.

I’ve been looking at just creating a special-case loop for displaying the posts on that page, but it seems like it should be possible to still view the posts on a page of my choice.

Sorry if I have missed something really obvious.

Thanks!

-Lee