It's worth sticking with Whittard of Chelsea; Recovering Incepta is worth holding on to

GUS, the owner of Argos and Homebase, yesterday set itself a two-year deadline to decide whether to break itself up as it unveiled plans to return £200m to shareholders.

"LET IT snow, let it snow, let it snow'. I can't remember which of this century's great Christmas lyricists was blessed with the inspiration for this uplifting refrain. But, as it wafted tinnily from the ceiling of my local branch of Homebase this week, I was moved heartily to concur.

Jason Nisse talks to the young mother hammering Homebase into shape

How do I look? If there's one thing more eye-catching than a room decorated with purple walls and faux-Georgian furniture, it's the man in leather trousers and flowing silk shirt behind it all. Meet Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, the handy dandy of daytime television

COMING JUST a few weeks after its quarterly trading statement, no one was expecting much from yesterday's half-year figures from Sainsbury's. But as only Sainsbury's can, the company still managed to leave a sour taste in City mouths after a briefing by analysts degenerated into a confrontation, which briefly forced the shares to an eight-year low.

J SAINSBURY, the struggling supermarket group, yesterday claimed it was on track to achieve its target to restore the core chain to a position of sales growth by the end of the year, though the City remained unconvinced.

Or will be if Colin Painter has anything to do with it. But do we really want our most private of spaces to be taken over by the stuff? By Tom Lubbock

The Tate's collaboration with Homebase in mass-producing art for the home isn't the first of its kind. And the project raises more questions than it answers.

THIS MORNING, should you have nothing else to do, why not stroll down to your local Homebase superstore? For there, as unexpected as a teddy bears' picnic in the middle of the M25, you will encounter modern art trying to make itself useful.

Sir: I do not know what happened to "before" (letter 18 September), but it seems to have fallen victim to a general belief that the more words, the better. Above the payphone in my local Homebase store a notice reads: "This payphone is emptied on a daily basis." The words "on", "a" and "basis" are redundant, but this flabby construction has now become all but ubiquitous (listen to any news broadcast).

ANOTHER NEWSPAPER'S corrections column has alerted readers that they might have been misled by a report that "the left-arm spinner ricked his back lifting his coffin out of the car". This was not some prescient bargain, a new line from Homebase, but recent slang among Australian and English cricketers for a cricket-bag taken on tour - not yet in any dictionary, nor in G. A. Wilkes's boggling Australian Colloquialisms.

CONTRAST IS the key. Use horizontal bands of different colours - keep them quite broad, having about five up a wall. It plays with your sense of perspective and really does make it feel as if the space has got much bigger. The more contrast there is between the stripes the more efficient the effect; white and black are the best because that really does trick your eye, but of course it's up to people whether they can live with that.

SAINSBURY'S Homebase is pulling out of the kitchens business in a move that will lead to the loss of 550 jobs.