A Definitive Ranking of the Top 15 Weirdest Details of Spare

Spare was an absolutely unhinged read, and it didn’t feel quite right to include all the bizarre details with the emotional parts. As such, I decided to separate the two. Here is my definitive ranking of the top 15 weirdest details of Spare.

1: 
Firstly, Harry and William used to launch rockets and fireworks at each other during play battles, and once dropped lit firecrackers on top of a friend in a ditch. I had to reread this part several times to make sure I saw it right. For context: right before they dropped the firecrackers, they found their hurt friend lying in a ditch and remarked that he was ‘lucky to be alive’. I do not understand how they thought dropping lit explosives onto him would be fun. To me, this was one of the many parts of the book that he probably shouldn’t have included.  

2:
Coming in a close second is every single thing he included about certain parts of his anatomy that we definitely didn’t ask for. This is the stuff that’s gone viral on TikTok: the charity ski race, frostbite, etc. I won’t get into specifics. If he had consulted with a single non-famous person, they would have told him that this was a bit too honest and definitely didn’t need to be published.

3:
In third, there’s the time that he gave Princess Kate an ermine thong at her wedding. There isn’t really much context that would explain this one.

4:
Fourth on the list, we have both times that Harry’s head was shoved into a literal dead animal in a ritual he called ‘blooding’. For context, this was done after he had killed the animal, and the first case was after his first kill. Regardless, I think this is a pretty Royal-specific tradition.

5: 
Ranking fifth was when Harry went to a psychic, who told him that his dead mother laughed at an incident where Archie, his son, broke an ornament of the Queen and then tried to spray it with water to fix it. I truly do not know how to adequately sum up that experience in words because it just doesn’t make much sense.

6:
Sixth was the time he taught his great-grandmother about Sacha Baron Cohen. I actually had to do some research here, since I knew almost nothing about Queen Elizabeth’s mother, who was also named Queen Elizabeth. I think it’s hilarious to picture a monarch laughing over Sacha Baron Cohen.

7:
Coming in at seventh is the fact that Harry’s father, Prince Charles, still carries around his childhood teddy bear. It is unclear as to why, but it seems like it may have something to do with his difficult childhood. I think this was an interesting detail but maybe one that would’ve been better left unpublished.

8:
I would put Harry’s trip from hallucinogenic mushrooms, where he thought the garbage can was a dragon, to eighth place, purely because it was pretty hard to understand. The first time I read it, I missed the part where he actually consumed the hallucinogens, so then I had no idea why the trash can was suddenly a dragon.

9.
Ninth is every other time that Harry used drugs. There are too many to list individually.

10.
Tenth is the fact that at the equivalent of elementary/middle school for him, matrons would bathe all the boys. This seemed really weird to me, and probably is not the best policy. The way he described it was especially weird, since he recalled finding the matrons “hot” after his mother’s death. I don’t want to be the one to unpack that. We’re just going to leave that there.

11.
Eleventh place goes to the fact that Prince Harry has drunk alcohol out of not one, but multiple prosthetic limbs. I feel like that’s a bizarre enough situation that it would take work to do it multiple times. It also raised so many questions for me. Did the prosthetic limb belong to someone? Where did they get it? Why?

12.
Ranking twelfth goes to Grub Day, an event when his school had tables and tables full of candy. This was a regular occurrence. For everyone’s information, Prince Harry apparently has a thing for Starbursts.

13.
I put the fact that his father does headstands in his boxers every day at thirteenth. It’s at the beginning of the book, in the introduction, and I think it’s a relatively tame detail compared to all the other things that Prince Harry writes later. My personal opinion, however, is that perhaps publishing details like that is not in his best interest.

14.
Fourteenth place goes to the time he almost got a tattoo of Botswana on his foot. I feel like this is a pretty common occurrence, so it wasn’t exactly weird, but it was entertaining.

15.
Finally, last place goes to the time when he described his lack of focus while flying for the British military as ‘head squirrels’. Although I personally have never flown for the British military, I feel like ‘head squirrels’ is as good a description as any.

In the interest of transparency, my rating criteria were based on two factors. First: how absolutely unhinged was it? Second: how unique was it? For example, while drug use isn’t a particularly unique part of a celebrity memoir, this is coming from Prince Harry. The detail he described it in is too creative for it not to be ranked ninth.

These fifteen details were just the tip of the iceberg, and if you’re interested in more, maybe you should think about reading Spare.