Bullet points don't work at the beginning of a text

It seems that there needs to be some text preceding a bullet point list.
If I write a node with the (only) text contents

then this will parse to

* blah

• blah
• blah

Which is not cool, because I need a CCK text field where my client (er... father... whatever) can specify a bullet point list of person details. Any chance this can be fixed soon and easy? Otherwise I'd need to hack it myself.