The Wales children definitely aren’t lacking in the hobbies department and love everything from tennis to rugby, football and gymnastics. However, like all children, Prince George, Charlotte and Louis inevitably go through phases of being more obsessed with one activity over another.
Whether it’s Princess Charlotte’s interest in spiders during lockdown, or George being "obsessed" with the Air Cadets when he was two, we’ve heard some intriguing anecdotes from Prince William and Kate over the years. But it was Prince Louis’s turn to have an unexpected new hobby revealed by his mum during the US State Visit.
The Princess and First Lady Melania Trump met with members of the Scouts’ Squirrels programme and Chief Scout Dwayne Fields on 18th September. During the engagement Kate explained that Louis is seriously interested in conker collecting right now!
It doesn’t come much more autumnal than this as a hobby and he’s clearly been spending plenty of time outdoors to build up a collection. His mum and dad are big advocates for getting out in nature so this no doubt got their seal of approval.
What might not have been as appreciated, though, was the series of unusual places Prince Louis has been storing his conkers at Adelaide Cottage.
"We keep finding conkers in cupboards, in his bed - conkers everywhere!" Kate reportedly told Dwayne, as per Hello! magazine. She added that the seven-year-old royal has even taken to putting the conkers in his toy trucks and playing with them.
This is utterly adorable, even if the Prince and Princess of Wales keep unearthing conkers in unexpected places throughout their house. You might think this was actually quite useful this time of year, but the idea that conkers are a way to get rid of spiders is apparently a myth.
Princess Charlotte, a big spider fan, will likely be delighted to hear it. Thankfully, for the future King and Queen, they won’t need to be picking up conkers around their home for that much longer as they tend to have mostly fallen by October.
Prince Louis’s conker collecting days for 2025 are numbered, though he’ll likely still be spending plenty of time outside with his family over the coming months. In a video released in April, Kate shared that being in nature gives her a sense of "peace" and a "very spiritual and very intense emotional reconnection".
It’s a big passion of hers and when she appeared on the Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast in 2020 the senior royal declared that her happy place was when she’s "with [her] family outside in the countryside and [they’re] all filthy dirty". In light of this, it’s possible that she’s even been joining Louis on some conker collecting trips at home.
The Prince has been keeping busy, as over the summer Prince William disclosed that he has been throwing himself into another hobby. According to Hello!, at the Tusk Conservation Awards last year he apparently told guests that Louis is now a keen drummer.
"My youngest is learning the drums - that's why I spend my entire life with my fingers in my ears," he joked.
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