The best four days of my life. Bold claim, I know. But hear me out.
It started with the flight - Gatwick to Valencia, two hours in the air, and then suddenly you are in Spain, it is warm, and you are on a bus heading north along the coast watching palm trees go past. The festival site came into view and I just thought: yes. This is right.
Coldplay headlined and were magnificent. I am not even a huge Coldplay fan - or I was not, anyway. But the combination of that set, those songs, that setting, with 50,000 people singing along to Fix You as the sun went down on the Spanish coast... it is a memory I will not be shifting any time soon.
Arctic Monkeys on the second night were tighter than I have ever seen them - leaner, more focused, brilliant. And Robbie Williams, who I genuinely expected to be a guilty pleasure, was genuinely outstanding. The crowd went absolutely berserk.
Between the music, there were beach days, late lunches in town, early-evening beers watching the sun go down, and then back to it all over again. Four days in, brown, sleep-deprived and completely happy, I booked my ticket for the following year before I had even got on the plane home.
