I can't speak for Simon but to me it looks like exactly the the kind of thing it takes me ages and ages to pick up, with lots of getting it hopelessly wrong and standing round wondering what I'm supposed to do next all the time.

This is in relation to the dancing, or the getting married?

Most of the time it's relatively easy to follow, your partner is nearby and/or holding you, and not too hard to recover if you get it wrong since you're mostly dancing with the same set of people.

The one dance that stressed me out at the ceilidh did so because it had a complicated phase where everyone was moving individually at the same time (which is much harder than having a fixed point of reference or someone to hold on to), because it changed what you had to do half-way through the dance, and because your couple moved to form a four with a different couple each iteration, and so I was responsible to different people each time for getting it right (or, er, wrong).

(S)

I looked in for a while but it all just looked far too complicated for something at the end of a rather tiring day. I am glad that people seemed happy, though.

I think I was lucky in that -- despite being uncoordinated and bad at following music -- my first ceilidh was really fun and never involved pain or embarassment, so I was motivated to come back. I do think it's much better than almost any other form of dancing in that you can *plausibly* join in first time, even if rather imperfectly.