An Orgy with Muggeridge, and a Missing Wallet

 Kingsley Amis's Memoirs – his self-described 'allobiography' – continues to be tremendous fun, and really not all that different from a conventional autobiography, except for being better written and much funnier. He largely skirts two subjects: his writing and his sex life – certainly not his drinking, which is omnipresent, but put in some kind of perspective by the even more heroic drinkers who feature in the memoir: John Braine, George Gale, Philip Toynbee... Sex, or Kingsley's participation therein, seldom rears its ugly head, but there is a memorable scene in which Malcolm Muggeridge (prior to his canonisation as St Mug) breezily suggests having an 'orgy' in his flat, though only the two of them and Sonia Orwell are present. In the event, both the men prove too comprehensively drunk to make the most of the occasion. 
  Elsewhere, Amis sings the praises of America (as it was when he was there), a country he loved so much he thought seriously of settling there, and he is good on the differences between Oxford, his natural home, and Cambridge, which he did not take to at all in his short residence there. While at Cambridge, he has a letter from another temporary resident, the now forgotten novelist Andrew Sinclair, who has been bombarding Amis with his novels as each of them comes out. 'The letter politely suggested we should meet "in this port and nuts of the soul", i.e., I supposed, Cambridge, a phrase showing signs of hard work, though perhaps not hard enough.' Sinclair invites the Amises to visit him and his wife, but it turns out that, alas, they 'have the builders in', so to the Amises they come. Next time, Sinclair insists, it's his turn – but, sure enough, they still have the builders in, so Amis suggests meeting in a pub:
'When the drinks came, Sinclair plunged his hand confidently into his top inner breast pocket. As in a dream I watched that confidence vanish in an instant, to be as quickly replaced by puzzlement, disbelief, consternation. Soon he was doing an imitation of a free-falling parachutist frenziedly trying to locate his unpulled ripcord. Finally his movements slowed, ceased, and shame possessed him. "I must have left my wallet in my other jacket," he said.'
A common enough scene in Amis's work, but surely never better described.