How did you gain the general history you had before? Through years of sitting through courses, years of watching television, years of watching the news or hearing it discussed, there's no Matrix option of just uploading this stuff and large general histories are overall not very helpful and will leave you with more bad understandings than good.

So do you need to sit in a classroom for 10 years again? No. But you do need to start slowly, and build up the knowledge. Pick a topic you are somewhat familiar with as a base point. Read a book about it, figure out which parts of that were interesting to you, read a book about that. Look through the sources that were discussed, look through the historians that were argued against, read their works. Branch out or in depending on how interested or not you are.

Don't hyperfocus either. One common trap is for people to start reading a history book and feeling like they need to look up every single person, every single place, every single event mentioned that they don't automatically know. Instead, just take a note, and come back to it later if you feel like you want to. If you try and master every single page from day one you're going to get overwhelmed and more confused than anything.

There isn't really one work or bit of media that is going to catch you up on 'general history'. You might as well start reading a lot of Wikipedia articles or something, seeing as a lot of pop history coverage is, quite frankly, bad. If you need a book, you could try A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bryson, who at least hangs a lot of detail (albeit too much irrelevant minutiae of persons) on his prose, but if you want quality historical knowledge you are going to have to pick a particular part of history and then look for good books covering it.

Thanks for reminding me, I'm due for a trip before the Easter throngs. And I need to take a tape measure to the V&A, I wish they'd give exhibits' measurements.

"Fun and creative" seems best done with other people: others will be in the same boat, and you can pool resources. See if there's a group interested in whatever aspects take your fancy? Local would be better, but online's a start, and you can trade ideas and maybe get something going. Maybe arrange group museum visits followed by a discussion?

For updating your knowledge, I recommend starting from some topic of particular interest and then radiating out from there, chronologically, geographically or thematically, or all three: that way you can take it at your own pace rather than biting off too much all at once (which reminds me again, I need to read up on Japan, too long on my "to do" list).