For a worrying moment I thought I'd lost my orange wig. The ball went into the back of the net and the crowd went wild. Not your normal football-supporters-celebrate-a-goal wild. But insanely, deliriously, “we stuck our fingers in the dyke and look we saved the entire world” wild. Dutch wild. And in the melée, someone grabbed my wig and threw it high into the air. After 30 seconds, during which I realised how attached I had become to my luminous, tightly permed hairpiece, it came flying back. I felt a strange sense of relief. My new identity remained intact.

I had been trying to be Dutch all day. Well, there's no point being English is there? England aren't at Euro 2008. So I thought I'd try and support somebody else and see how that feels. To be frank, I wouldn't have wanted to go to the tournament if England had been in it. I've followed England abroad and it's not much fun. I covered the World Cup in France in 1998 and had a miserable time.

Wherever I went it was great - until the England fans turned up to drink themselves into oblivion and fight running battles with the local youths. I was cowering at the back of a darkened café when England went out to Argentina. My quiet cheers of relief could not be heard over the sound of breaking glass all down the street.

Euro 2008 seemed the perfect opportunity to watch football without being ashamed of my nationality or in fear of my life. The Dutch team, and their exuberant fans, have lit up the tournament. There is a groundswell of English support for Holland. Jon Gledstone, a designer who lived in Amsterdam for a while, launched the “Just Go Dutch” campaign with a funny website that earned him an invitation to the Dutch embassy in London, where he was awarded an honorary “Van” prefix to his surname. He supports Holland because they regularly underperform in tournaments like us. “And they play well. I guess that's different to us.” A poll by another national newspaper found that a majority of English football fans are supporting the Dutch.

Some websites in the Netherlands have said that they don't want our support because of our hooligans. But a spokesman for the Dutch embassy said that I would be welcome to join the Oranje order. “Dutch people are really proud and happy with English fans saying they support our guys.” His advice: “Wear orange. The crazier the better.”

In Bern, where Holland has been playing, a large Dutchman called Albert Vrijs, listens as I explain that I have no team to support. Could I be a Dutchman? “Ja! Fantastic.” He says that the Dutch and the English have things in common. “We are a bit up and down. And we are not good at penalties.” I feel we are bonding already. Could he tell me how to be more Dutch? “We're a little bit crazy. We work very hard, then we go nuts for a while. Then go back to work.” He looks me up and down. “You need to be orange!” I go to a fan stall and buy a Holland T-shirt and baseball cap. Vrijs then donates his own orange wig to the cause, pulling it down over my cap. “Ja! Fantastic!”

I cannot understate how seriously the Dutch take their orange outfits: orange Elvises, tangerine suits, men in women's traditional Dutch dress complete with pigtails and false breasts, orange popes (singing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life) apparent escapees from Guantanamo Bay in orange jump suits. And the hats. Cowboy hats, Mexican hats, Viking helmets, traditional bonnets, crowns. Hats with soft toys, hats with cheeses, hats with hammers, hats with antennae, with hands, feet, penises. Then there are the glasses. A man could write a thesis about the glasses, which range from the Dame Edna to the downright ludicrous.

For many it is clearly more about the hats and the party than the football. Tens of thousands of Dutch without tickets have been milling around the city. Take the Hannemann Volkel brass band, a group of middle-aged and retired folk who have driven ten hours just to play their traditional tunes in the square and then go and watch the game at their hotel 20 miles outside Bern. I bump into the self-styled Prins van Oranj, a senior bod in the official Dutch supporters club, resplendent in fur-trimmed vestments and claiming to be only 69. He explains that the explosion in wearing orange began at Euro 1996 in England and then begins to give a potted history of the royal House of Orange. I get a bit lost after the third or fourth William. Was it acceptable for an Englishman to wear orange? “I find it OK,” he decrees loftily.

On the whole, the reaction to my presence is along the lines of Mirjam Bayense's comment: “The more the better, man.” That's not to say that I don't get a lot of very bemused responses. “Why are you here?” people keep asking. Some think it is great, others that I am mad. They start jabbering away in Dutch, only for me to start explaining that I am English; after 20 times it gets tedious.

It is also disconcerting how matter-of-fact the Dutch are about how bad the England football team are. “You are rubbish,” says Mark Slaats, a student from Maastricht. “Are you going to write about the war and how much we hate the Germans?” Misunderstanding his take on this most sensitive of subjects I mutter that we don't do that sort of thing in British newspapers. “Oh, but you must!” he says.

Numerous other nationalities mingle in Bern's streets before games. I run into five fans from London wearing England shirts. Dave Cohen and his mates are driving around in a camper van, taking their pick of matches and trying to buy tickets outside the grounds. “I wasn't bothered that England didn't qualify. I was quite happy,” says Cohen. He had been at the 2006 World Cup. “That first match in Frankfurt was the worst: 60,000 people pissing in fountains. Horrendous.” During the game against Italy, a group of my new pals tried to teach, me the Dutch national anthem but I couldn't really grasp it and so just did my impression of a man choking on a fishbone - which seemed a fairly close approximation to what they were all singing.

You know the ones. There's Olé, olé olé olé, olé, olé, and the one that goes: Ner, ner, ner. Ner, ner, ner. Ner, ner, ner, ner, ner. Holland! Watching goals fly in, I cheered, caught up in the moment. But half an hour afterwards, as they would put it, “craaazee”, I realised that I could not deny that I miss England. Not the fans, but the footballers. I feel like a gatecrasher at someone else's party.

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