dancing a merry tangent
Heck, that almost never happens here, alexis

a shambles, to me, is a mess, a cock-up, close to a disaster sometimes.
Yes, this is another situation where the Aussie (prob. meaning Australasian here, eh CapK? ) meaning of old slang is almost exactly the same as the Brit meaning.
The stuff about butcher's and/or fishmonger's benches was to do with supposed origins of the word.

For a disaster we'd talk about an "absolute shambles", though it would still be more like a huge cock-up than a genuine disaster. Thinking about it, "shambles" rarely relates to a physical mess, it's more of an organisational/administrative mess. Does that apply elsewhere?

Fisk