LOOKING back to the week of October 2 to October 8, ten years ago...

A PIONEERING scheme which aims to recruit 1,000 volunteers to help their elderly neighbours was launched in Darlington in October 2013.

The Good Friends project, commissioned by Darlington Partnership, aimed to support 1,500 older and vulnerable people in Darlington in its first year by recruiting volunteers to help them with simple day-to-day tasks in a bid to combat isolation and increase independence in older people.

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Run by Age UK Darlington, in partnership with Darlington Police and Darlington Neighbourhood Watch Association, the scheme also aimed to build a support network for both volunteers and their elderly neighbours.

The chief executive of Age UK Darlington, Gillian Peel, said: “The Good Friends is going to be an army of 1,000 informal volunteers who will do small tasks to help neighbours and others in their community to ensure they have a better quality of life.

“Small jobs could include pushing the wheelie bin round, walking the dog, phoning to say, are you okay, or reaching for something on the top shelf."

A former sergeant major in the Parachute Regiment fulfilled a dream by building a Wild West town to stage high-octane paintball shootouts, in October 2013.

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John Wayne fan Will Scullion said he hoped the town of Purgatory, set in the Black Plantation, on Aske Moor, near Richmond, North Yorkshire, alongside a Krypton Factor assault course, would attract up to 16,000 paintballing fans a year.

The town, based on classic Western movies, is the size of two football pitches and can hold games for up to 50 paintballers at a time.

It features a church, complete with pews and a pulpit, a barbers, a cemetery, a general store, a two-storey hotel and saloon with beer pumps, a bank with a safe, a teepee, a post office and a scaffold with hangman’s noose.

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Finally, a grandfather who fell into a river while doing DIY outside his neighbour’s house thanked everyone involved with his dramatic rescue and has spoken of his terrifying ordeal.

Jim Cunningham, 78, was left with agonising injuries after falling backwards off a ladder and into the River Tees, at Barnard Castle, while painting his neighbour’s conservatory at Demesnes Mill, on Saturday, September 14, 2013.

Mr Cunningham was airlifted to James Cook University Hospital after suffering nine broken ribs, a punctured lung, two wedge fractures of his spine and hypothermia.