A man lies on the ground. Naked save for a tiny top hat tied to his testicles, he burns in the midday sun. He has no sunblock. He has, to be frank, no mind. His sole possession — a large, inflatable daffodil — lies beside him, punctured and filthy.

And as I look at him — at 11am on Sunday morning, yards away from the Chou Chou caramel nuts stall, I think: “You really don't see many of them, these days.”

Glastonbury has changed over the years. Time was, a naked unconscious man with a topper on his knackers would have been a common sight, come Sunday morning.

In the years before the super-fence, anyone could get in — and did — which lent Glastonbury the air of a Mad Max-style dystopia, run by elves. These days, however, things are much less edgy.

In the 21st century Glastonbury has grown up. It's very chilled. It's very well organised. There's even an RAC depot on-site in case someone needs to bleed their clutch. If Glastonbury were a person, it would have turned from a bright, wild, troubled teenager, into a thirtysomething Scandinavian who builds his own sauna. But for all that clear-eyed, right-on calm, Glastonbury can still be the most random, exhilarating and alive person you know.

This fabulous unpredictability was rammed home by the controversy over Saturday's headline act. As Pete Paphides explains in his review, before Jay-Z performed, the prognosis for the multimillion-selling rapper was not good. It was not good at all.

It was predicted that he would be bottled off the stage by outraged white rock fans, then lynched to a chant of “We want Coldplay”. Instead, both audience and artist rose to the occasion and turned in a moment of real, euphoric, pop-culture history. You couldn't imagine it happening anywhere else. The world of urban beats and the world of canvas and cider have always seemed irreconcilable.

But a wonderful air of curiosity is embedded in Glastonbury's bones — and what you found outré on Thursday, by Sunday is greeted merely with a shrug and an amused “Why not?”.

After all, when you've spent all weekend sitting under a 30ft robot ant, watching a man dressed as a toilet holding hands with Queen Victoria, you might as well go down to the Pyramid Stage, and attend your first hip-hop gig.

“This was important for my culture,” Jay-Z announced, visibly moved, at the end of his extraordinary set.

I like to imagine him now, hosting a dinner party in LA, inviting Kanye West, Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Rihanna and Dr Dre, and going: “So there's this farm, right? And it's in the middle of, like, yokel-land. And you can do anything there — so long as you use the correct recycling bin. Dre, have you ever tried falafel?”

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