Eva Bradley: Given a chance, life's coming up all Eva

I'VE made a point before about my reluctance to grow up. All of us have a little bit of Peter Pan or Wendy lurking within, but how much we show that side of us to the world and whether we choose to indulge or repress it is a personal choice.
Sometimes in life, it feels like we are each bearing the weight of the world on our shoulders - worrying about work, paying mortgages, raising families or making, mending or ending relationships.
Lately the load has felt a little too much, but instead of slipping further under the duvet, I've decided instead to focus on the Wendy moments. Life follows your thoughts and to extrapolate the fable theme further, I'm Alice through the looking glass, seeing a reflection that isn't the entire reality, but is a shiny part of it all the same.
I started by playing house. With last week's banana boxes stacked chaotically in every room of my new place, the temptation to be overwhelmed and open only the grog box was immediate.
Instead, employing the feminine wiles of yet another literary character from my youth, I made like Pollyanna and played the "Glad Game".
I was glad to be back in my house, I was glad to even have one, and I sure as hell was glad that for the next 10 hours I would have the unmitigated pleasure of finding a place for every last little thing.
Kind of. Well, not at all, really, but that's the whole point of the Glad Game, isn't it? To be glad instead of sad, mad, bad or other rhyming adjectives.
When I got around to re-homing my swollen collection of vintage china, I felt like a little girl living the dream: Playing in my doll's house, except the fantasy had flicked into a parallel universe where it was thrillingly life-size.
The next day (as I do), I found myself in the studio with a fashion designer, shooting her next season's look book. Employing my Alice-meets-Wendy-meets-Pollyanna mentality, it occurred to me that I quite possibly had the best job in the entire world: I was being paid by the hour to play with a life-sized Barbie doll and dress her up. I just had to resist the urge to cut all her hair off.
That job done, my next was to sit where I am right at this very instant and write 600 words about my life.
Lately, I've copped a bit of flak for seeing the glass half-empty in these column inches. But since perception is often more compelling than reality, it has dawned on me that, once again, I'm being paid to be a kid, to sit down and write a short story about my week - one in which (if only Mum would stump up and be a subscriber) I would be able to proudly show off to demonstrate not only what I've been doing in class lately but also my extended use of big and challenging words ("mortgages" "unmitigated" and "extrapolate" perhaps being this week's stars).
Life for all of us, it would seem, is jam-packed full of highs, lows and in-betweens. Often the highs go unreported simply because few of us sit down to talk, write or share about the good times because we're all too busy being out there enjoying them.
So it is that we can all too easily dwell on the downers, or see the repetitive boredom in the microcosm of daily life as if through a smeary old plate-glass window, instead of how it really is.
This week, in defiance of those who say I'm all about the down and out, I've taken a great big bottle of Mr Muscle Glass to my view of the world, and you know what? It's all just coming up Eva.